The Optimist's Daughter | Image and Myth in Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter

In the following essay, Mortimer analyzes how Welty "enhances the implications of her images" in The Optimist's Daughter.

One of the striking characteristics of Eudora Welty's fiction—taken as a whole—is the remarkable diversity of styles she summons from story to story. Welty herself has said that when she begins a new story nothing she has written before is of much help to her, that each new story teaches her how to write itself. Yet when we turn to a novel such as The...

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