Women Writers and the US South: Eudora Welty
The Study Sessions: 'Women Writers and the US South: Violence, Aberration and the 'Southern Gothic' are focusedon different versions of the American South as realised in the work of four of its authors. Beginning with Flannery O'Connor (1925 - 1964) and moving on to Alice Walker (1944 - ), Eudora Welty (1909 - 2001) and Carson McCullers (1917 - 1967), each session will provide a context in which to discuss representations of race, gender and sexuality. We will look at the issue of genre (Gothic, Grotesque, Regionalism) and the complex question of what it might mean to be a writer in, of and about The South.
Convened in collaboration with author Graham Caveney.
“They better not call me that!”: Eudora Welty and the Southern Gothic, with Stephanie Palmer
Welty didn’t like being associated with the Southern Gothic any more than she enjoyed the association between the U.S. South and the grandstanding voice of William Faulkner. Her quiet short stories and novels, though, hint at the kinds of social conflicts and pressure points associated with the Gothic. Instances of injustice against African Americans haunt the fiction and in subtle ways the fiction resists this injustice. Her fiction portrays the entrapment of white Americans, particularly women, within claustrophobic families and situations. The humour, variety, and depth of her fiction reward rereading.
Stephanie Palmer is a Senior Lecturer of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Subject Leader of English at Nottingham Trent University. She received her PhD in English Literature from the University of Michigan, after writing her undergraduate honours thesis on Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples. Her book, Together by Accident: American Local Color Literature and the Middle Class (Lexington Books, 2009), traces a motif of regional travel accident through the works of writers like Sarah Orne Jewett and William Dean Howells, illustrating that regional literatures use underhanded literary strategies to focus readers’ attention on the serious and uncomfortable issue of social class. Her current research focuses on the reception of American women writers in the British fin-de-siècle and concepts of female transmission and influence.
Event:
Women Writers and the US South: Eudora WeltyDates:
24 Oct 2017, 6.30pm–8.30pmSupported by:
