The Late Novels of Eudora Welty

While Welty has received much praise for her work as a writer of short fiction, a critic and reviewer, a photographer, and an autobiographer, her career as a novelist has been largely neglected by critics and the reading public alike. In this collection, fourteen new essays by internationally distinguished critics of southern literature provide focused appraisals of the writer's last two novels: Losing Battles (1970) and The Optimist's Daughter (1972).Editors Jan Nordby Gretlund and Karl-Heinz Westarp contend that to see beyond the South, it is not enough to apprehend the region and be imaginatively nourished by it; a journey of self-discovery is required in order to gain the necessary, distance. Welty's late novels triumphantly constitute such a journey from the discovery of her place to self-discovery and vision.