Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Welty, Eudora (Vol. 105) - James Walter (essay date Fall 1988)

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James Walter (essay date Fall 1988)

SOURCE: "Place Dissolved In Grace: Welty's Losing Battles," in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. XXI, No. 1, Fall, 1988, pp. 39-53.

[In the following essay, Walter discusses Welty's Losing Battles.]

The more one gets to know Eudora Welty's characters and to observe her construction of worlds in words and images, the more difficulty one has in seeing a division between objective and subjective, outward and inward. Her physical locales, though faithful renderings of the world's appearance in convincing visual detail, are always also figures of the thought, emotions, and dreams of her characters and narrators; and usually what wisdom her characters achieve is by way of imaginative awareness of their place as a reflector of their own and time's deepest secrets. Welty's characters typically begin in their stories with attitudes or beliefs settled in routine or tradition and sometimes hardened by a...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Maureen Howard (review date 2 November 1980)
   2. Eudora Welty with Jo Brans (interview date Summer 1981)
   3. Paul Bailey (review date 4 June 1982)
   4. Nancy B. Sederberg (review date Fall 1983)
   5. Eudora Welty with Tom Royals and John Little (interview date 1984)
   6. Eric Homberger (review date 20 July 1984)
   7. Eudora Welty with Barbara Lazear Ascher (interview date Autumn 1984)
   8. Lee Smith (review date Spring 1985)
   9. Daniel Aaron (review date 2 May 1985)
   10. Harriet Pollack (essay date Fall 1986)
   11. Suzanne Marrs (essay date October 1986)
   12. Barbara Harrell Carson (essay date Spring 1988)
   13. Floyd C. Watkins (essay date Spring 1988)
   14. James Walter (essay date Fall 1988)
   15. Eudora Welty with Sally Wolff (interview date January 1990)
   16. Jan Nordby Gretlund (essay date Fall 1992)
   17. Sally Wolff (essay date Fall 1992)
   18. Eben E. Bass (essay date Spring 1993)
   19. Gary M. Ciuba (essay date Fall 1993)
   20. Alexandr Vaschenko (essay date Fall 1993)
   21. Carol Shields (review date 12 August 1994)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Eudora Welty