- 252 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
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 RichardEudora 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 raceâoutlining 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."
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Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- IntroductionâUnderground Woman: The Secret History of Eudora Welty and the Mystery Genre
- Eudora Welty and Mystery: Noir Variations
- Reading Eudora Weltyâs âPetrified Manâ and âOld Mr. Marblehallâ as Southern Pulp
- Detecting the Forbidden Fruit in Eudora Weltyâs The Golden Apples
- Courtâs Opened: The Ponder Heart and Murderous Women
- The Sleuth of Pinehurst Street
- Detecting Dr. Strickland: The Author as âMindhunterâ
- When a Mystery Leads to Murder: Genre Bending, Hommes Fatals, Thickening Mystery, and the Covert Investigation of Whiteness in Eudora Weltyâs Losing Battles
- Unsolved Mysteries: Reading Eudora Weltyâs The Optimistâs Daughter with Agatha Christieâs The Body in the Library
- Confluence: The Fiction of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald
- Appendix: Mysteries on the Shelves in Eudora Weltyâs House
- About the Editors and Contributors
- Index