Eudora Welty and politics : did the writer crusade? / edited by Harriet Pollack and Suzanne Marrs.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Pollack, Harriet.

Marrs, Suzanne.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Welty, Eudora, 1909-2001--Political and social views.

Welty, Eudora.

Welty, Eudora, 1909-2001.

Politics and literature--United States--History--20th century.

Politics and literature.

Political and social views.

United States.

History.

Political fiction, American--History and criticism.

Political fiction, American.

Physical Description:

viii, 268 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Other Title:

Eudora Welty & politics

Place of Publication:

Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2001]

Summary:

This collection of complementary and interrelated essays by ten well-known Welty critics brings welcome clarification to the controversial subject of Eudora Welty and the political, a topic once presumed to be closed tight. As the essays prove, Welty has been inaccurately assessed by critics from Diana Trilling in the Nation (1943) to Claudia Roth Pierpont in the New Yorker (1998) as a writer who avoids political, historical, or cultural engagement in her fiction. The better question these essayists explore is not whether but how Welty's work is to be understood as political.

Harriet Pollack, Suzanne Marrs, Peggy Prenshaw, Noel Polk, Suzan Harrison, Ann Romines, Rebecca Mark, Barbara Ladd, Sharon Baris, and Daniele Pitavy-Souques place Welty's seeming rejection of the political in her 1961 essay "Must the Novelist Crusade?" into the cultural and historical context of 1940-1960, when "individualism" was a code word for political and personal freedom and was defined in contrast to totalitarianism as represented by Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. Welty, they show, though she repudiated the concept of fiction as editorial, wrote stories that were inherently and unavoidably political.

The essayists look closely at how surprisingly often Welty's fiction, criticism, and photographs are oblique responses to public political issues -- political corruption, racial apartheid, poverty, McCarthyism and the Rosenberg trials, violent resistance to the civil rights movement, integration of schools, and filial piety and southern reverence for identities of the cultural past. The deceptive opposition of the terms private and political may be most at fault for misreading Welty.

As the only living author to be reedited by the Library of America, Eudora Welty deserves a sound appreciation of her complex oeuvre. Eudora Welty and Politics provides just that, approaching Welty's work from an all-new point of view to reveal how the writer repeatedly registered a political vision in her work.

Contents:

Eudora Welty and Politics: Did the Writer Crusade? / Harriet Pollack 1

Welty's Transformations of the Public, the Private, and the Political / Peggy Prenshaw 19

Engaging the Political: In Our Texts, in Our Classrooms / Noel Polk 47

"The Huge Fateful Stage of the Outside World": Eudora Welty's Life in Politics / Suzanne Marrs 69

"Racial Content Espied": Modernist Politics, Textuality, and Race in Eudora Welty's "The Demonstrators" / Suzan Harrison 89

A Voice from a Jackson Interior: Eudora Welty and the Politics of Filial Piety / Ann Romines 109

A "Cross-mark Ploughed into the Center": Civil Rights and Eudora Welty's Losing Battles / Rebecca Mark 123

"Writing against Death": Totalitarianism and the Nonfiction of Eudora Welty at Midcentury / Barbara Ladd 155

Judgments of The Ponder Heart: Welty's Trials of the 1950s / Sharon Deykin Baris 179

Private and Political Thought in One Writer's Beginnings / Daniele Pitavy-Souques 203

Seeing Welty's Political Vision in Her Photographs / Harriet Pollack, Suzanne Marrs 223.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0807126187

OCLC:

44313248