Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and race / edited by Harriet Pollack.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Pollack, Harriet.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Welty, Eudora, 1909-2001--Criticism and interpretation.

Welty, Eudora.

Welty, Eudora, 1909-2001.

White people in literature.

Race relations in literature.

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

viii, 275 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Athens : University of Georgia Press, [2013]

Summary:

Faced with Eudora Welty's preference for the oblique in literary performances, some have assumed that Welty was not concerned with issues of race, or even that she was perhaps ambivalent toward racism. This collection counters those assumptions as it examines Welty's handling of race, the color line, and Jim Crow segregation and sheds new light on her views about the patterns, insensitivities, blindness, and atrocities of whiteness.

Contributors to this volume show that Welty addressed whiteness and race in her earliest stories, her photography, and her first novel, Delta Wedding. In subsequent work, including The Golden Apples, The Optimist's Daughter, and her memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, she made the color line and white privilege visible, revealing the gaping distances between lives lived in shared space but separated by social hierarchy and segregation. Even when black characters hover in the margins of her fiction, they point readers toward complex lives, and the black body is itself full of meaning in her work. Several essays suggest that Welty represented race, like gender and power, as a performance scripted by whiteness. Book jacket.

Contents:

Reading Welty on Whiteness and Race / Harriet Pollack Pollack, Harriet 1

Welty, Race, and the Patterns of a Life / Suzanne Marrs Marrs, Suzanne 23

Parting the Veil: Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, and the Crying Wounds of Jim Crow / Susan V. Donaldson Donaldson, Susan V. 48

Eudora Welty's Making a Date, Grenada, Mississippi: One Photograph, Five Performances / Keri Watson Watson, Keri 73

"The Little Store" in the Segregated South: Race and Consumer Culture in Eudora Welty's Writing and Photography / Mae Miller Claxton Claxton, Mae Miller 95

Secret Agents: Welty's African Americans / David McWhirter McWhirter, David 114

Laughing in the Dark: Race and Humor in Delta Wedding / Sarah Ford Ford, Sarah 131

"I Knowed Him Then Like I Know Me Now": Whiteness, Violence, and Interracial Male Intimacy in Delta Wedding and "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" / Jean C. Griffith Griffith, Jean C. 148

Bodies on the Brink: Vision, Violence, and Self-Destruction in Delta Wedding / Donnie McMahand McMahand, Donnie 165

"Black Men Dressed in Gold": Racial Violence in Eudora Welty's "The Burning" / Patricia Yaeger Yaeger, Patricia 185

Ice Picks, Guinea Pigs, and Dead Birds: Dramatic Weltian Possibilities in "The Demonstrators" / Rebecca Mark Mark, Rebecca 199

Rethinking the Unthinkable: Tracing Welty's Changing View of the Color Line in Her Letters, Essays, and The Optimist's Daughter / Julia Eichelberger Eichelberger, Julia 224.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780820344324

082034432X

9780820344331

0820344338

OCLC:

792884032