Originally published in 1995, this book gathers together eleven full-length essays on important American short story sequences of the twentieth century. The introduction by J. Gerald Kennedy elucidates problems of defining the genre, cites notable instances of the form (such as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio), and explores the implications of its modern emergence and popularity. Subsequent essays discuss illustrative works by such figures as Henry James, Jean Toomer, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, J. D. Salinger, John Cheever, John Updike, Louise Erdrich, and Raymond Carver. While examining distinctive thematic concerns, each essay also considers implications of form and arrangement in the construction of composite fictions that often produce the illusion of a fictive community.

The impulses that fired the Southern Literary Renaissance echoed the impetus behind the Irish Literary Revival at the turn of the twentieth century, when Ireland sought to demonstrate its cultural equality with any European nation and disentangle itself from English-imposed stereotypes. Seeking to prove that the South was indeed the cultural equal of greater America, despite the harsh realities of political defeat, economic scarcity, and racial strife, Southern writers embarked on a career to re-imagine the American South and to re-invent literary criticism. Transatlantic Renaissances: Literature of Ireland and the American South traces the influence of the Irish Revival upon the Southern Renaissance, exploring how the latter looked to the former for guidance, artistic innovation, and models for self-invention and regional renovation.While Deleuze and Guattari's model for minor literature refers to minority or regional authors who work within a major language for purposes of subversion, Artuso modifies their term along generic and thematic lines to refer to errant female juveniles within subsidiary genres whose nonconformist development threatens to disrupt the dominant patriarchal culture of a region or nation. Using the themes of initiation and maturation to anchor the book, Artuso analyzes how the volatile development of young women in revivalist texts often reflects or questions larger growth pangs and patterns, including the evolution of the literary revival itself and the development of a regional minority group that must work within a dominant culture, language, and nation while seeking methods of subversion. With minor literature as the container for undervalued genres such as popular fiction and short stories--often considered an author's juvenilia--this work investigates not only how these texts challenge the authoritative claims of the novel, but also scrutinizes the renaissance trope of female rebirth, as the revivalists often figured cultural, national, or regional regeneration through the metamorphoses or maturation of female protagonists such as Cathleen n Houlihan, Scarlett O'Hara, and Virgie Rainey. Drawing upon New Historical, New Critical, and postcolonial approaches, Artuso examines works by Lady Gregory, Margaret Mitchell, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Toomer, and James Joyce.

In this study, Ruth D. Weston probes the whole of Eudora Welty’s work to reveal the writer’s close relationship to the gothic tradition. Specifically, Weston shows how Welty employs the theme of enclosure and escape and settings that convey a sense of mystery—gothic adaptations both—to create certain narrative techniques in her fiction. Differentiating at the outset between the Gothic genre as opposed to elements of the gothic tradition, and acknowledging both critics’ and Welty’s own reluctance to link her writing with the former, Weston plunges in and brilliantly discloses the relationship Welty’s writing has to both, and in doing so describes a rich literary heritage to which Welty belongs. She shows how the tradition of adapting European Gothic conventions to American settings has come down to us through writers such as Hawthorne, particularly through the short story, and continues in Welty’s fiction. Among Welty’s narrative techniques that Weston discusses are plot structures built around betrayal and captivity, reversal of characters’ gender roles, a tone sometimes similar to that of gothic genres such as the fairy tale or ghost story, and affective settings in “gothic spaces” such as the woods along the Natchez Trace. These techniques, Weston explains, help Welty in illustrating restrictions placed on the individual’s search for selfhood by human relationships, cultural expectations, and memory. In addition to examining the texts themselves, Weston draws on Welty’s critical and theoretical writings and her letters and other materials in archival collections. She also gleans insights from the work of contemporary narrative theorists, feminist critics, and recent commentators on the Gothic. In the course of her presentation, she offers some excellent new assessments of Welty’s relation to the “female Gothic” and the “Southern Gothic” and to William Faulkner and Jane Austen. This book is one of the most informed studies to date of Welty’s relation to the literary mainstream of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Welty scholars as well as general readers of American and southern literature will gain a deep appreciation for Welty’s imaginative and original response to the Gothic literary tradition.

In this volume an attempt is made to tackle Hellenism as a global and transcultural entity. Through an array of essays, this book constitutes a comparative study of various literary, cultural and artistic trends as these develop throughout the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries on both sides of the Atlantic. Having been designed with the general as well as the specialized reader in mind, this book will prove to be a valuable guide to scholars, undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as to a broad spectrum of readers with an interest in comparative literature, cultural history, history of the classical heritage, transatlantic studies, English and American romantic, modernist and postmodernist narratives. Its diverse material falls under the umbrella terms of “English Hellenisms” and “American Hellenisms” with the intention of enhancing intercultural dialogue and understanding. By embracing multivocality, as proven by the number of articles it contains, this book proves the tenacity, diachronic and intercontinental appeal of Hellenism at the era of multiculturalism and globalization.

Presents a biography and critical views of the works of Eudora Welty.