Contributions by Jacob Agner, Susan V. Donaldson, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Stephen M. Fuller, Jean C. Griffith, Ebony Lumumba, Rebecca Mark, Donnie McMahand, Kevin Murphy, Harriet Pollack, Christin Marie Taylor, Annette Trefzer, and Adrienne Akins Warfield The year 2013 saw the publication of Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race, a collection in which twelve critics changed the conversation on Welty’s fiction and photography by mining and deciphering the complexity of her responses to the Jim Crow South. The thirteen diverse voices in New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race deepen, reflect on, and respond to those seminal discussions. These essays freshly consider such topics as Welty’s uses of African American signifying in her short stories and her attention to public street performances interacting with Jim Crow rules in her unpublished photographs. Contributors discuss her adaptations of gothic plots, haunted houses, Civil War stories, and film noir. And they frame Welty’s work with such subjects as Bob Dylan’s songwriting, the idea and history of the orphan in America, and standup comedy. They compare her handling of whiteness and race to other works by such contemporary writers as William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Chester Himes, and Alice Walker. Discussions of race and class here also bring her masterwork The Golden Apples and her novel Losing Battles, underrepresented in earlier conversations, into new focus. Moreover, as a group these essays provide insight into Welty as an innovative craftswoman and modernist technician, busily altering literary form with her frequent, pointed makeovers of familiar story patterns, plots, and genres.

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. Her black characters in particular recognize whiteface and blackface as performances, especially comical when white characters are unaware of their role play. Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race also makes clear that Welty recognized white material advantage and black economic deprivation as part of a cycle of race and poverty in America and that she connected this history to lives on either side of the color line, to relationships across it, and to an uneasy hierarchy of white classes within the presumed monolith of whiteness. Contributors: Mae Miller Claxton, Susan V. Donaldson, Julia Eichelberger, Sarah Ford, Jean C. Griffith, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Donnie McMahand, David McWhirter, Harriet Pollack, Keri Watson, Patricia Yaeger.

Published to high praise--"groundbreaking . . . a landmark" (Poets and Writers)--this was the first anthology to celebrate the diversity of women who write.

Contributions by Jacob Agner, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Katie Berry Frye, Michael Kreyling, Andrew B. Leiter, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Tom Nolan, Michael Pickard, Harriet Pollack, and Victoria Richard Eudora Welty’s ingenious play with readers’ expectations made her a cunning writer, a paramount modernist, a short story artist of the first rank, and a remarkable literary innovator. In her signature puzzle-texts, she habitually engages with familiar genres and then delights readers with her transformations and nonfulfillment of conventions. Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight reveals how often that play is with mystery, crime, and detective fiction genres, popular fiction forms often condescended to in literary studies, but unabashedly beloved by Welty throughout her lifetime. Put another way, Welty often creates her stories’ secrets by both evoking and displacing crime fiction conventions. Instead of restoring order with a culminating reveal, her story-puzzles characteristically allow mystery to linger and thicken. The mystery pursued becomes mystery elsewhere. The essays in this collection shift attention from narratives, characters, and plots as they have previously been understood by unearthing enigmas hidden within those constructions. Some of these new readings continue Welty’s investigation of hegemonic whiteness and southern narratives of race—outlining these in chalk as outright crime stories. Other essays show how Welty anticipated the regendering of the form now so characteristic of contemporary women mystery writers. Her tender and widely ranging personal correspondence with the hard-boiled American crime writer Ross Macdonald is also discussed. Together these essays make the case that across her career, Eudora Welty was arguably one of the genre’s greatest double agents, and, to apply the titles of Macdonald’s novels to her inventiveness with the form, she is its “underground woman,” its unexpected “sleeping beauty.”

Letters revealing a lost literary world—and a unique friendship between a brilliant author and a New Yorker editor. For over fifty years, Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, two of our most admired writers, penned letters to each other. They shared their worries about work and family, literary opinions and scuttlebutt, and moments of despair and hilarity. Living half a continent apart, their friendship was nourished and maintained by their correspondence. What There Is to Say We Have Said bears witness to Welty and Maxwell’s editorial relationship—both in Maxwell’s capacity as New Yorker editor and in their collegial back-and-forth on their work. It’s also a chronicle of the literary world of the time; they talk of James Thurber, William Shawn, Katherine Anne Porter, J. D. Salinger, Isak Dinesen, William Faulkner, John Updike, Virginia Woolf, Walker Percy, Ford Madox Ford, John Cheever, and many more. It is a treasure trove of reading recommendations. Here, Suzanne Marrs—Welty’s biographer and friend—offers an unprecedented window into two intertwined lives. Through careful collection of more than three hundred letters as well as her own insightful introductions, she gives us “a vivid snapshot of 20th-century intellectual life and an informative glimpse of the author-editor relationship, as well a tender portrait of devoted friendship” (Kirkus Reviews).

Contributions by Anita DeRouen, Susan V. Donaldson, Julia Eichelberger, W. Ralph Eubanks, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Bernard T. Joy, John Wharton Lowe, Anne MacMaster, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Donnie McMahand, Kevin Murphy, Harriet Pollack, Annette Trefzer, Jay Watson, and Ryoichi Yamane Working closely in each other’s orbit in Mississippi, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright created lasting portraits of southern culture, each from a distinctly different vantage point. Taking into consideration their personal, political, and artistic ways of responding to the histories and realities of their time and place, Faulkner, Welty, Wright: A Mississippi Confluence offers comparative scholarship that forges new connections—or, as Welty might say, traces new confluences—across texts, authors, identities, and traditions. In the collection, contributors discuss Faulkner’s Light in August; Sanctuary; Go Down, Moses; As I Lay Dying; “A Rose for Emily”; and “That Evening Sun”; Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings; One Time, One Place; The Optimist’s Daughter; Losing Battles; “Why I Live at the P.O.”; “Livvie”; “Moon Lake”; “The Burning”; “Where Is the Voice Coming From?”; and “The Demonstrators”; and Wright’s Native Son; The Long Dream; 12 Million Black Voices; Black Boy; Lawd Today!; “The Man Who Lived Underground”; “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow”; and “Long Black Song.” Acknowledging that Mississippi ground was never level for any of the three writers, the fourteen essays in this volume turn from the familiar strategies of single-author criticism toward a mode of analysis more receptive to the fluid mergings of creative currents, placing Wright, Welty, and Faulkner in comparative relationship to each other as well as to other Mississippi writers such as Margaret Walker, Lewis Nordan, Natasha Trethewey, Jesmyn Ward, Steve Yarbrough, and Kiese Laymon. Doing so deepens and enriches our understanding of these literary giants and the Mississippi modernism they made together.

Contributions by Jacob Agner, Sharon Deykin Baris, Carolyn J. Brown, Lee Anne Bryan, Keith Cartwright, Stuart Christie, Mae Miller Claxton, Virginia Ottley Craighill, David A. Davis, Susan V. Donaldson, Julia Eichelberger, Kevin Eyster, Dolores Flores-Silva, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Stephen M. Fuller, Dawn Gilchrist, Rebecca L. Harrison, Casey Kayser, Michael Kreyling, Ebony Lumumba, Suzanne Marrs, Pearl Amelia McHaney, David McWhirter, Laura Sloan Patterson, Harriet Pollack, Gary Richards, Christin Marie Taylor, Annette Trefzer, Alec Valentine, Adrienne Akins Warfield, Keri Watson, and Amy Weldon Too often Eudora Welty is known to the general public as Miss Welty, a "perfect lady" who wrote affectionate portraits of her home region. Yet recent scholarship has amply demonstrated a richer complexity. Welty was an innovative artist with cosmopolitan sensibilities and progressive politics, a woman who maintained close friendships with artists and intellectuals throughout the world, a writer as unafraid to experiment as she was to level her pen at the worst human foibles. The essays collected in Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty seek to move Welty beyond a discussion of region and reflect new scholarship that remaps her work onto a larger canvas. The book offers ways to help twenty-first-century readers navigate Welty's challenging and intricate narratives. It provides answers to questions many teachers will have: Why should I study a writer who documents white privilege? Why should I give this "regional" writer space on an already crowded syllabus? Why should I teach Welty if I do not study the South? How can I help my students make sense of her modernist narratives? How can Welty's texts help me teach my students about literary theory, about gender and disability, about cultures and societies with which my students are unfamiliar?