Understanding Eudora Welty

Offering fresh insights into the work of one of America's classic fiction writers, Understanding Eudora Welty provides close readings of Welty's novels and short stories and the memoir One Writer's Beginnings at the same time that it sifts through contemporary reviews and recent criticism. Michael Kreyling suggests that understanding the critical history of Welty's canon is almost as important as understanding the works themselves.Kreyling describes the New Critics' explanation of Welty's fiction, which was based on their preference for the unity of meaning in a well-made work of art. He illustrates how she met their requirements with outstanding examples of literary technique. Kreyling also traces the mounting interest of feminist critics in Welty's work after the publication in 1984 of One Writer's Beginnings.As he considers the many assessments and reassessments of Welty's work, Kreyling uncovers the myriad identities that critics have attached to her -- that of southern writer, southern gothicist, "Southern Renaissance" writer, modernist, and feminist. Denying the sufficiency of any single label, Kreyling suggests that Welty never wrote to a formula and never wrote the same story twice.