Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2006. / Title from title screen. Audrey Goodman, committee chair; Pearl Mchaney, Christopher Kocela, committee members. Electronic text (99 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Apr. 25, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-99).

Thesis--Heidelberg. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 145-152).

Eudora Welty is an author concerned with relationships between human beings. Throughout A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, The Wide Net and Other Stories, and The Golden Apples, Welty's characters search for ways in which to establish and sustain viable bonds. Particularly problematic are the relationships between opposite sexes. I argue that Welty uses communication as a tool for sustaining a relationship in her early work. I further argue that when her stories provide mostly negative outcomes, Welty moves on to a illuminate the possibility and subsequent failure of relationships via innocence in the natural world. Finally, Welty explores, through her characters, the attempt at marginalization and the quest for relationships outside the culture of the South.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Tulsa, 1990. / Bibliography: leaves 169-178.

Thesis (M.A.)--Villanova University, 2009. / English Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

Honors Project--Smith College, Northampton, Mass., 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 77-79).

Eudora Welty and Wallace Stevens share important aesthetic beliefs, especially regarding uses of the creative imagination by artists in acts of creation and characters in acts of living. A close reading of seventeen of Welty's stories, accompanied by references to related ideas in many of Stevens' poems, reveals how the imagination functions as epistemology and eucharist, while governing the shape of individual human views of the quotidian. The more abstract patterns of thought in their later works seem to move Welty closer to belief in a world beyond the quotidian than they do Stevens.

The present MA thesis discusses Eudora Welty's short fiction and the author's engagement with the plantation memory. The introductory chapter defines the concept of plantation memory as a flux of the normative plantation binaries, the plantation mythology obscuring the ante-bellum Southern reality, the linguistic and phenomenal evidence of the prevailing oppression, and the ability of the text and its creator to subvert the official narratives and to liberate the individuals' silenced voices. Applying an interdisciplinary approach, the thesis examines the processes in which the particular selves are confronted with the plantation order and in which their identities are consolidated, either resisting or crumbling under the social pressure. The three analytical chapters of the thesis discuss nine of Welty's short stories that were selected from The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty on the basis of the typology and criteria outlined in the introduction. Without claiming that the nine stories present the sum of Welty's artistic achievement, the texts attempt to demonstrate general tendencies and narrative strategies that the author applies in her short fiction, writing about and within the plantation memory. The selection includes as many different texts as possible and contains three stories and three...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, English Dept., 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

The three novels discussed in this essay avoid the abstraction of ideology without resorting to oversimplification. William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man are, among other things, the presentation of character in context. In chapters two, three, and four, I consider consecutively the character structures of the protagonists of the three novels in terms of the interaction between the individuals and the communally prescribed character structures of the traditional South which form their context. With Addie Bundren, Faulkner exemplifies the southerner's preference for stable, primary-colored individuality over the more mobile, versatile, inclusive "individuation" to which he objects because, from his traditional viewpoint, it leaves the individual isolated and alienated with no way of relating his world to the necessarily divergent worlds around him and no way of coping adequately with unforseen human events. Inheriting negation in place of tradition, Addie's death and burial leave the family in a bestially primitive state, existing without benefit of the accumulated experience of history. The traditional society, however, is not the only one that utilizes the experience of past generations. A perspective of the values and limitations of a family living according to southern traditions as it faces changes in conflict with its "individuated" members provides a literary view of the workings of a traditional milieu from the inside in Delta Wedding. Welty intimates that real life--the spontaneous action and reaction of an "individuated" being to present phenomena--is more powerful than the restraining and, because dated, erroneous traditions surrounding it. The protagonist of Ellison's Invisible Man moves from a culturally prescribed "preconsciousness" to the furthest extremes of "individuation". The acceptable ways of being black in the South offer so little possibility for the black man that his entire environment can be seen as a maze of traps placed by the culture between the individual and what twentieth-century democratic thought has come to define as basic human freedom. Falling first into the hands of racists, then paternalists, and finally--the most subtle trap of all--the complex and contradictory concepts of the nature of the black man as conceived by southern black men themselves, the Invisible Man exposes as he experiences the primary facets of southern racism. Breaking through these traditions, the Invisible Man does not attempt to become a white man with a black skin, but locates those elements of his black culture that are viable within the larger perspective of his liberated consciousness. Finally, Ellison posits the need for an "individuated" personality as prerequisite to the naming of the reality that forms its context. And, as Faulkner has shown with Addie Bundren, individuated being has insufficient scope for meeting existential exigencies if it is formed without the positive tensions of a broader than individual view--what Ellison calls "myth". As Welty shows, the southern myth is insufficiently inclusive to allow for universal survival through diversified compatibility. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate