B. V.M., Sara McAlpin. "Family in Eudora Welty's Fiction." The Southern Review 18.3 (July 1982): 480-494. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism Select. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 25 Feb. 2011.
A prominence on family is exactly what this article is about and how it ties into Eudora Welty’s style of writing. Sara McAlpin, the author of the article "Family in Eudora Welty's Fiction,” explains how “Welty repeatedly explores in her writing the nature of family.” Paragraph after paragraph, the role of family and/or the affects that a family can have on one occur often, along with details from Delta Wedding to support McAlpin’s thinking. Perhaps Eudora’s own childhood memories could have an affect on how she portrays the family’s actions in her novels. In Delta Wedding, Laura’s family comes off as one huge party. Everyone seems close with everyone, with a few exceptions, and moral support as well as courage is presented amongst each other. “The Farchild family has its own devices for ordering reality as it chooses, occasionally contributing to negative consequesnces for individula members;” As Laura is just visiting her family for a wedding, lessons are taught and sustained life advice is learned. As close as the Farchild family might seem, secrets also tend to linger which was the example the author used to lead into the negative affects of the family “importance” people face. Sara McAlpin then closes with stating that “family provides the source not just for viewing and ordering reality but shaping reality.” This article had a lot of supporting details to back up the family aspect of Welty’s writing. Delta Wedding also was mentioned and used quite often which made the article’s information easier to relate too.
"Time and Confluence: Self and Structure in Welty's //One Writer's Beginnings//"continues to go on and on about multiple different stories by Eudora Welty but one mentions Delta Wedding once. The author, Gary M. Ciuba, constantly gives examples from Welty’s stories that intertwine into her childhood, which has been the common subject to the the articles I chose. Ciuba clarifies, “Laura McRaven's reverie on the train at the beginning of Delta Wedding as well as Laurel McKelva Hand's dream of the train ride to Mount Salus at the end of The Optimist's Daughter grew from precisely such play of the mind over the terrain,” and then closes that statement explaining how Welty’s past experiences through different environments and settings throughout her life, have contributed to her style of writing. Learning the ways of Welty’s writing has me thinking that maybe her novels pertain to her own self, adding certain things she hoped would have played out? The author of the article says how in the beginning of One Writer’s Beginning Welty is played out to always able to be herself, which starts her own life story. This article was more helpful when it came to understanding Eudora Welty’s emotion and meaning behind her pieces of work, but not helpful when it came to referencing to Delta Wedding or giving multiple examples from the book.
"Eudora Welty."Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 25 Feb. 2011. French, Warren.
The autobiography of Eudora Welty gives personal information, careers, sidelights, media adaptations, awards and a list of Welty’s works. Eudora was born in Mississippi in 1909, where she later continued her education at Mississippi State College for Women. Yet her personal info does not give any details about her home life, marriage, ect, we can conclude that she was a very busy women with all her observing that she tended to do growing up, which later shows up in a number of her novels. Before she was a writer, Welty worked for local newspapers and radio stations, then later fulfilling her dreams as a southern writer. The awards list travels on and on, honoring Welty’s numerous, arousing stories. "I am a writer who came of a sheltered life," Welty explained in her autobiography. "A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within." In my opinion, that quotes shows a lot of who Eudora actually is and how she was happy, more less content, with the life she accomplished. The article givers Welty’s readers more of a personal insight on who she is not only as an “ammeter” writer, but as a human being.
"Eudora Welty: Overview." Contemporary Novelists. Susan Windisch Brown. 6th ed. New York: St. James Press, 1996. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 25 Feb. 2011.
“Unlike the modernists, she is a writer who has accepted, as the price of civilization, its discontents,” is the very first sentence that catches my attention in "Eudora Welty: Overview."The sentence explains how Welty really paid attention to the “real” things in life, a common characteristic among Realism writers, that was rare among the literature of her time. She acknowledges the fact that the times that are happening in the world are harsh, brutal, especially when it comes to the Great Depression. In her one mentioning of Delta Wedding, she concludes that “Welty did not linger in the distant past, but returned with her next novel, Delta Wedding, to the world where she best found her voice…” Welty often tends to use symbols as well to represent actual world happening events. For example, “This acceptance finds form in her still too much neglected first novel, The Robber Bridegroom, which comes as close as any American fiction to providing a myth of the nation's maturing as, with the passing of the frontier, the wilderness gives way to the mercantile state.” The author also ties in the importance of the settings in Welty’s novels. Delta Wedding is only mentioned briefly with a short snip it of an example but Eudora’s style/role in writing is explained throughout the article. In my opinion, Welty seemed like an author that didn’t follow the “likely” styles of writing in that time period. It seemed she wasn’t afraid to portray the world as it was in her novels, especially her being a woman, which was a tremendous difference from what society was used to.
Homberger, Eric. "Review of //One Writer's Beginnings//." TLS 4242 (20 July 1984): 806. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Deborah A. Schmitt. Vol. 105. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 28 Feb. 2011.
Focusing more on the “southern style” of Welty’s writing, the author, Homberger, explains how Eudora was influenced by what was happening in her society around her, but not so influenced. The United States was slowly going through the Great Depression and the Civil Rights era when Welty began her adventure of novels. Homberger explicates how Welty tired in more of the southern landscapes than the south’s dramatic happenings. She used so much of her past as a template to her stories but somehow she ignores the traumatic events happening around her. Isaac Rosenfeld, a neighboring writer of Eudora Welty’s time, states his opinion: "The serious American writer cannot but be alienated from American society, close though he may be to it, and much though he may wish to belong.” Rosenfeld continues to believe that Welty’s was too “polite” when it came to the truth coming out in her pieces. He feels that she would probably have been more successful in southern writing if she attempted to portray the meaning of the factual south. Homberger closes with, “taking Welty seriously would mean questioning the massive investment in modernism and alienation in American culture.” The article again, only mentioned Delta Wedding once and gave brief details of how it correlated to the supporting details of the editorial.
In the article of "'The treasure most dearly regarded': memory and imagination in Delta Wedding" Suzanne Marrs explains how Eudora Welty used memories from her childhood and incorporated them into her stories like Delta Wedding. When Welty attended college at Mississippi State College for Women, she would take a variety of trips and visit old, historic landmarks. “The train trip Laura takes is like the one Welty took from Artesia to Columbus as a college student, and one significant location in the story is based upon a Columbus landmark Welty had often visited,” Suzanne Marrs clarifies, while she gives evidence referring to Delta Wedding. Not only does Marrs compare Eudora’s childhood memories to her writing, she also constantly evaluates the two Welty pieces of “The Delta Wedding” and “The Delta Cousins.” Even though Delta Wedding began to grow from the short story “The Delta Cousins,” the significance between the two remain at a limit. A common theme between the two would be the characters intertwined in the novel, as well with the setting. The setting is another example of another past memory that shows up in Welty’s work. The extravagant house that is the main setting on the Delta in Delta Wedding was inspired by Eudora’s hike out to Waverley, where the grand plantation home stood. The aspects of the house helped her shape an image of exactly what she wanted, and displaying it right on the front cover of Delta Wedding.
Kelly Sultzbach in the article, The Chiasmic Embrace of the Natural World in Eudora Welty's "Delta Wedding,” describes the tie between Welty’s southern writing and the typical environment that the south portrays. The author persistently uses examples to compare the environmental characteristics as “symbols” that relate to the novel. Sultzbach supposed that “to characterize Delta Wedding primarily as southern pastoral is to focus on nature as symbol rather than Welty's pervasive, tangible use of nature as a physical, animate force.” She gives supporting details that explain the difference between that symbolic and animate quality that is in Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, mostly having to decide for one’s self which is presented. The characters in Welty’s southern writing stories depend on the southern setting whether it may be living day after day in that atmosphere or being able to look back on the surroundings and relate it to home. “Delta Wedding is more than an examination of a "southern" problem of relationships between land and people; it also speaks very directly to the modernist concerns of Welty's era, as well as some of the values that are at the crux of our current cultural debates,” Kelly Sultabach claimed. Throughout the article, the regular ambiance that wouldn’t be thought twice about is questioned by the author, going “behind the scenes” of what Welty really meant with the Delta setting she used in Delta Wedding. The whole article consisted of examples and clip it’s from Delta Wedding which became very useful in understanding the ways of the book in more depth.
Welty, Eudora, and Jo Brans. "Struggling against the Plaid: An Interview with Eudora Welty.". Listen to the Voices: Conversations with Contemporary Writers, Jo Brans. Southern Methodist University Press, 1988. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Deborah A. Schmitt. Vol. 105. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 25 Feb. 2011.
Welty, Eudora, and Sally Wolff. "Some Talk about Autobiography: An Interview with Eudora Welty." The Southern Review 26.1 (Jan. 1990): 81-88. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Deborah A. Schmitt. Vol. 105. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 26 Mar. 2011.
The interviewer, Jo Brans, continuously asks Eudora Welty on multiple topics being where she gets her characters, what influences her styles of writing, and some questions about her childhood since it manipulated her novels tremendously. Welty explains how her hobbies as a child remained hobbies but writing was always triggered by her imagination. She then goes into how her style of working affects the content of her stories; sometimes being the character starts the plot of the whole novel or the plot creates the characters. When Brans brings up Delta Wedding and how the portrayal of men versus women is, Eudora answers with “In the Delta it's very much of a matriarchy, especially in those years in the twenties that I was writing about, and really ever since the Civil War when the men were all gone and the women began to take over everything.” She makes clear that she just wanted to show how important the difference between women and men was to her and especially to the meaning of the story. She explains how she didn’t live through the changing time in the Delta but she portrayed it how she believed and researched it to be, having the women be the “rooster” of the household. Closing with the interview, Eudora Welty says how she has an imagination but not necessarily a mystery or magical mind. Welty says “I only think in terms of the story. Of this story.”
Wilder
4th Honors L.A.
03/16/11
Annotated Bibliography
B. V.M., Sara McAlpin. "Family in Eudora Welty's Fiction." The Southern Review 18.3 (July 1982): 480-494. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism Select. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 25 Feb. 2011.
A prominence on family is exactly what this article is about and how it ties into Eudora Welty’s style of writing. Sara McAlpin, the author of the article "Family in Eudora Welty's Fiction,” explains how “Welty repeatedly explores in her writing the nature of family.” Paragraph after paragraph, the role of family and/or the affects that a family can have on one occur often, along with details from Delta Wedding to support McAlpin’s thinking. Perhaps Eudora’s own childhood memories could have an affect on how she portrays the family’s actions in her novels. In Delta Wedding, Laura’s family comes off as one huge party. Everyone seems close with everyone, with a few exceptions, and moral support as well as courage is presented amongst each other. “The Farchild family has its own devices for ordering reality as it chooses, occasionally contributing to negative consequesnces for individula members;” As Laura is just visiting her family for a wedding, lessons are taught and sustained life advice is learned. As close as the Farchild family might seem, secrets also tend to linger which was the example the author used to lead into the negative affects of the family “importance” people face. Sara McAlpin then closes with stating that “family provides the source not just for viewing and ordering reality but shaping reality.” This article had a lot of supporting details to back up the family aspect of Welty’s writing. Delta Wedding also was mentioned and used quite often which made the article’s information easier to relate too.
Ciuba, Gary M. "Time and Confluence: Self and Structure in Welty's //One Writer's Beginnings//." The Southern Literary Journal 26.1 (Fall 1993): 78-93. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Deborah A. Schmitt. Vol. 105. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 28 Feb. 2011.
"Time and Confluence: Self and Structure in Welty's //One Writer's Beginnings//" continues to go on and on about multiple different stories by Eudora Welty but one mentions Delta Wedding once. The author, Gary M. Ciuba, constantly gives examples from Welty’s stories that intertwine into her childhood, which has been the common subject to the the articles I chose. Ciuba clarifies, “Laura McRaven's reverie on the train at the beginning of Delta Wedding as well as Laurel McKelva Hand's dream of the train ride to Mount Salus at the end of The Optimist's Daughter grew from precisely such play of the mind over the terrain,” and then closes that statement explaining how Welty’s past experiences through different environments and settings throughout her life, have contributed to her style of writing. Learning the ways of Welty’s writing has me thinking that maybe her novels pertain to her own self, adding certain things she hoped would have played out? The author of the article says how in the beginning of One Writer’s Beginning Welty is played out to always able to be herself, which starts her own life story. This article was more helpful when it came to understanding Eudora Welty’s emotion and meaning behind her pieces of work, but not helpful when it came to referencing to Delta Wedding or giving multiple examples from the book.
"Eudora Welty." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 25 Feb. 2011.
French, Warren.
The autobiography of Eudora Welty gives personal information, careers, sidelights, media adaptations, awards and a list of Welty’s works. Eudora was born in Mississippi in 1909, where she later continued her education at Mississippi State College for Women. Yet her personal info does not give any details about her home life, marriage, ect, we can conclude that she was a very busy women with all her observing that she tended to do growing up, which later shows up in a number of her novels. Before she was a writer, Welty worked for local newspapers and radio stations, then later fulfilling her dreams as a southern writer. The awards list travels on and on, honoring Welty’s numerous, arousing stories. "I am a writer who came of a sheltered life," Welty explained in her autobiography. "A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within." In my opinion, that quotes shows a lot of who Eudora actually is and how she was happy, more less content, with the life she accomplished. The article givers Welty’s readers more of a personal insight on who she is not only as an “ammeter” writer, but as a human being.
"Eudora Welty: Overview." Contemporary Novelists. Susan Windisch Brown. 6th ed. New York: St. James Press, 1996. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 25 Feb. 2011.
“Unlike the modernists, she is a writer who has accepted, as the price of civilization, its discontents,” is the very first sentence that catches my attention in "Eudora Welty: Overview."The sentence explains how Welty really paid attention to the “real” things in life, a common characteristic among Realism writers, that was rare among the literature of her time. She acknowledges the fact that the times that are happening in the world are harsh, brutal, especially when it comes to the Great Depression. In her one mentioning of Delta Wedding, she concludes that “Welty did not linger in the distant past, but returned with her next novel, Delta Wedding, to the world where she best found her voice…” Welty often tends to use symbols as well to represent actual world happening events. For example, “This acceptance finds form in her still too much neglected first novel, The Robber Bridegroom, which comes as close as any American fiction to providing a myth of the nation's maturing as, with the passing of the frontier, the wilderness gives way to the mercantile state.” The author also ties in the importance of the settings in Welty’s novels. Delta Wedding is only mentioned briefly with a short snip it of an example but Eudora’s style/role in writing is explained throughout the article. In my opinion, Welty seemed like an author that didn’t follow the “likely” styles of writing in that time period. It seemed she wasn’t afraid to portray the world as it was in her novels, especially her being a woman, which was a tremendous difference from what society was used to.
Homberger, Eric. "Review of //One Writer's Beginnings//." TLS 4242 (20 July 1984): 806. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Deborah A. Schmitt. Vol. 105. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 28 Feb. 2011.
Focusing more on the “southern style” of Welty’s writing, the author, Homberger, explains how Eudora was influenced by what was happening in her society around her, but not so influenced. The United States was slowly going through the Great Depression and the Civil Rights era when Welty began her adventure of novels. Homberger explicates how Welty tired in more of the southern landscapes than the south’s dramatic happenings. She used so much of her past as a template to her stories but somehow she ignores the traumatic events happening around her. Isaac Rosenfeld, a neighboring writer of Eudora Welty’s time, states his opinion: "The serious American writer cannot but be alienated from American society, close though he may be to it, and much though he may wish to belong.” Rosenfeld continues to believe that Welty’s was too “polite” when it came to the truth coming out in her pieces. He feels that she would probably have been more successful in southern writing if she attempted to portray the meaning of the factual south. Homberger closes with, “taking Welty seriously would mean questioning the massive investment in modernism and alienation in American culture.” The article again, only mentioned Delta Wedding once and gave brief details of how it correlated to the supporting details of the editorial.
Marrs, Suzanne. "'The treasure most dearly regarded': memory and imagination in Delta Wedding." The Southern Literary Journal 25.2 (1993): 79+. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 25 Feb. 2011.
In the article of "'The treasure most dearly regarded': memory and imagination in Delta Wedding" Suzanne Marrs explains how Eudora Welty used memories from her childhood and incorporated them into her stories like Delta Wedding. When Welty attended college at Mississippi State College for Women, she would take a variety of trips and visit old, historic landmarks. “The train trip Laura takes is like the one Welty took from Artesia to Columbus as a college student, and one significant location in the story is based upon a Columbus landmark Welty had often visited,” Suzanne Marrs clarifies, while she gives evidence referring to Delta Wedding. Not only does Marrs compare Eudora’s childhood memories to her writing, she also constantly evaluates the two Welty pieces of “The Delta Wedding” and “The Delta Cousins.” Even though Delta Wedding began to grow from the short story “The Delta Cousins,” the significance between the two remain at a limit. A common theme between the two would be the characters intertwined in the novel, as well with the setting.
The setting is another example of another past memory that shows up in Welty’s work. The extravagant house that is the main setting on the Delta in Delta Wedding was inspired by Eudora’s hike out to Waverley, where the grand plantation home stood. The aspects of the house helped her shape an image of exactly what she wanted, and displaying it right on the front cover of Delta Wedding.
Romines, Ann. "Reading the cakes: Delta Wedding and the texts of Southern women's culture." The Mississippi Quarterly 50.4 (1997): 601+. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 25 Feb. 2011.
Sultzbach, Kelly. "The Chiasmic Embrace of the Natural World in Eudora Welty's 'Delta Wedding'." The Southern Literary Journal 42.1 (2009): 88+. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 25 Feb. 2011.
Kelly Sultzbach in the article, The Chiasmic Embrace of the Natural World in Eudora Welty's "Delta Wedding,” describes the tie between Welty’s southern writing and the typical environment that the south portrays. The author persistently uses examples to compare the environmental characteristics as “symbols” that relate to the novel. Sultzbach supposed that “to characterize Delta Wedding primarily as southern pastoral is to focus on nature as symbol rather than Welty's pervasive, tangible use of nature as a physical, animate force.” She gives supporting details that explain the difference between that symbolic and animate quality that is in Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, mostly having to decide for one’s self which is presented. The characters in Welty’s southern writing stories depend on the southern setting whether it may be living day after day in that atmosphere or being able to look back on the surroundings and relate it to home. “Delta Wedding is more than an examination of a "southern" problem of relationships between land and people; it also speaks very directly to the modernist concerns of Welty's era, as well as some of the values that are at the crux of our current cultural debates,” Kelly Sultabach claimed. Throughout the article, the regular ambiance that wouldn’t be thought twice about is questioned by the author, going “behind the scenes” of what Welty really meant with the Delta setting she used in Delta Wedding. The whole article consisted of examples and clip it’s from Delta Wedding which became very useful in understanding the ways of the book in more depth.
Welty, Eudora, and Jo Brans. "Struggling against the Plaid: An Interview with Eudora Welty.". Listen to the Voices: Conversations with Contemporary Writers, Jo Brans. Southern Methodist University Press, 1988. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Deborah A. Schmitt. Vol. 105. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 25 Feb. 2011.
Welty, Eudora, and Sally Wolff. "Some Talk about Autobiography: An Interview with Eudora Welty." The Southern Review 26.1 (Jan. 1990): 81-88. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Deborah A. Schmitt. Vol. 105. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 26 Mar. 2011.
The interviewer, Jo Brans, continuously asks Eudora Welty on multiple topics being where she gets her characters, what influences her styles of writing, and some questions about her childhood since it manipulated her novels tremendously. Welty explains how her hobbies as a child remained hobbies but writing was always triggered by her imagination. She then goes into how her style of working affects the content of her stories; sometimes being the character starts the plot of the whole novel or the plot creates the characters. When Brans brings up Delta Wedding and how the portrayal of men versus women is, Eudora answers with “In the Delta it's very much of a matriarchy, especially in those years in the twenties that I was writing about, and really ever since the Civil War when the men were all gone and the women began to take over everything.” She makes clear that she just wanted to show how important the difference between women and men was to her and especially to the meaning of the story. She explains how she didn’t live through the changing time in the Delta but she portrayed it how she believed and researched it to be, having the women be the “rooster” of the household. Closing with the interview, Eudora Welty says how she has an imagination but not necessarily a mystery or magical mind. Welty says “I only think in terms of the story. Of this story.”