Serious Daring from Within: Female Narrative Strategies in Eudora Welty's Novels

(Hardback)

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Most critics of Southern novelist Euroda Welty have analyzed her work with a primary focus on her Southern background. This work instead uses a gender-specific approach to analyzing Welty's novels, illustrating how Welty's narrative techniques establish female authority and frequently undermine patriarchal values. In "Serious Daring From Within", Gygax examines "Delta Wedding", "The Golden Apples", "Losing Battles" and "The Optimist's Daughter", and argues that Eudora Welty indirectly and subtly created a "radical vision" of a female world. The study applies feminist literary theory when considering the various narrative structures of each novel. Scholars of literary criticism, Southern literary studies and/or women's studies should find this work of interest.

Author Bio

FRANZISKA GYGAX is a Research Fellow of the Swiss Foundation for the Sciences and Humanities in Switzerlandand a Visiting Fellow at the English Department at Princeton University. Her publications include Gertrude Stein and the Deconstruction of the Family: The Making of Americans in Women in Search of Literary Space, ed Katrina Bachinger, Gudrun Grabher, and Maureen Lange-Devine, (forthcoming).