Eudora Welty Review 2023:
Volume 15 of EWR includes an essay by Katie Berry Frye on “A Piece of News” and the Ruth Vande Kieft award-winning essay by Pamela J. Merryman on The Shoe Bird; a cluster of essays on Welty and ecology including an essay by Jill Goad on The Golden Apples, Grace Perry McCright’s reading of “Moon Lake,” Nicole Salama’s essay on The Optimist’s Daughter, and Sarah Ford’s reading of Delta Wedding; notes on Welty and Bowen and Welty and Jewett, the transcription of an interview of Welty by Dick Cavett, a tribute to archivist Forrest Gayley, book reviews of Eudora Welty and Mystery, a volume edited by Jacob Agner and Harriet Pollack, and The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty by Danièle Pitavy-Souques and regular features including Practical Matters and the Checklist of Scholarship. See full table of contents here.
Announcements:
A special call for papers: the 2024 EWR will feature a special cluster dedicated to Welty and Material Culture. A daring writer, accomplished photographer, and avid consumer of varying forms of “high” and “low” culture, Welty’s opus keenly incorporates material artifacts as she examines the relationship between individuals and communities and their material world. Her fiction often includes veritable shopping lists of objects—consider Sister’s roster of ragtag items packed for the P.O. or the motley assortment in The Ponder Heart of Uncle Daniel’s “things . . . that he’s given away.” Always attuned to “art’s responsibility” for “[m]aking reality real,” Welty’s writer’s eye is both clear sighted and critical in its exploration of the tangible–irrespective of time and place–as well as the social construction of identity (regional and national) and the (re)production and polemic uses of material culture. For this special cluster in EWR, the editors seek submissions that consider Welty’s engagement with the material world broadly, including examples in her fiction, essays, and photographs. Topics might include but are not limited to objects such as clothing, cosmetics, detritus, found objects, furniture, monuments, musical instruments, textiles, toys, and works of art. Submissions might also explore conspicuous consumption, consumer culture, the objective correlative, gender and performance, thing theory, and trash culture. Articles from interdisciplinary perspectives—history, art, multimedia, philosophy, etc.—are especially encouraged. Send any queries to co-editor Rebecca Harrison (rharriso@westga.edu) or guest editor Katie Frye (Katie.Frye@pepperdine.edu).
The Eudora Welty Review is pleased to announce that two research grants have been awarded for 2023 to Elizabeth Crews of Blue Mountain Christian University and Harriet Pollack of College of Charleston. Elizabeth Crews will be working on “Eudora Welty and Mary Louise Aswell” by exploring the collection of correspondence between Welty and Aswell housed at Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Harriet Pollack will be working on “Eudora Welty Leaves Home: Letters Between Mother and Daughter” by exploring the long-sealed Welty Family Papers, also housed at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Results of these research projects will be published in the 2024 Eudora Welty Review. Read more about these projects and the Eudora Welty Review Research Grant here
Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) has announced that The Eudora Welty Digital Archives is now available to the public on the MDAH website. This digitization project was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities with a matching contribution from the Eudora Welty Foundation. The Eudora Welty Digital Archive represents only a sample of Welty-related material housed at MDAH and features selections of correspondence, manuscripts, photographs, and other media related to Welty.
