This volume offers readings of Eudora Welty's last two novels, Losing Battles (1970) and The Optimist's Daughter (1972), which won a Pulitzer prize. The essays focus on Welty's work as a novelist, although she was better known as a writer of short fiction, a critic and reviewer, a photographer, and an autobiographer. This collection seeks to stimulate interest in this aspect of the writer's talent and to serve as a guide to reading and teaching her late novels.

This study offers 14 essays by critics of Southern literature on Welty's last two novels: Losing Battles (1970), an experiment in narration, and The Optimist's Daughter (1972), a comment on our time and winner of a Pulitzer Prize. This collection seeks to stimulate interest in Welty's work as a novelist and to serve as a guide to reading and to teaching her late novels.

Flannery O'Connor's Radical Reality brings together essays by a number of distinguished O'Connor scholars, four of whom were the writer's friends, to assess the impact of the political, religious, and social milieu of her time on novels and short stories that consistently attract interpretive attention and are rediscovered by new generations of readers. The contributors mark the current terrain of scholarship on the wry Georgian writer and open new avenues for future explorations in O'Connor's work.

In a collection of essays as provocative as the region that inspired them, leading historians and literary critics offer a combined effort to define Southern identity at the end of the twentieth century. Removed from the devotional, certifying, and celebratory view of the South that has dominated books of this genre, The Southern State of Mind addresses the question of whether inherited Southern values, problems, and contradictions have survived the onslaught of modernization. The overarching dialogue among the contributors illustrates how the ideological self-identification in the South has...

In Still in Print, eighteen Southern novels published since 1997 fall under the careful scrutiny of an international cast of accomplished literary critics to identify the very best of recent writings in the genre. These essays highlight the praiseworthy efforts of a pantheon of novelists celebrating and challenging regionality, unearthing manifestations of the past in the present, and looking to the future with wit and healthy skepticism.

An insightful guidebook to some of the best examples of modern Southern fiction, as selected by an international group of critics

Jan Nordby Gretlund has been studying the literature of the American South for some fifty years, and his outsider's perspective as a European scholar has made him an intellectually acute witness of both the literature and its creators. In this volume he interviews fourteen Southern storytellers who reveal their influences, methods and daily routines, and struggles with the writing process.