Michael Kreyling

Elucidates the critical history of Welty's corpus.

5 x 7, 272 pages
cloth, ISBN 1-57003-283-1, $34.95s
Understanding Contemporary American Literature, Matthew J. Bruccoli, series editor

ABOUT THE BOOK

Understanding Eudora Welty provides close readings of Welty's novels and short stories and the memoir One Writer's Beginnings. Michael Kreyling sifts through contemporary reviews and recent criticism in arriving at his assessment. Noting that Welty's work has been before the public and in the minds of literary critics for nearly a half century, he suggests that understanding the critical history of her 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. He credits feminist critics with providing some of the most refreshing appraisals of her writings in more than a generation.

As he considers the many assessments and reassessments of Welty's work, Kreyling uncovers and discusses 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. Kreyling instead reveals the dynamic growth in the depth and complexity of Welty's vision and literary technique over the course of her career.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Kreyling is the author of two previous books about Eudora Welty, Eudora Welty's Achievement of Order and Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell. He is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

The Novels of Ross Macdonald

RELATED TITLES

The Late Novels of Eudora Welty
Edited by Jan Nordby Gretlund and Karl-Heinz Westarp