Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race Reconsidered

Abstract

Responding to work begun in the 2013 collection Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race that mined and deciphered the complexity of her responses to the Jim Crow South, the thirteen diverse voices of New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race deepen, reflect on, and respond to those seminal discussions. As a group these essays draw added attention to the tangling, interdependent intersectionality in Welty’s portrayals of race, class, and gender––an interaction defining and configuring our American social structure and prominent American systems of disadvantage in both Welty’s time and our own. These essays and the collection as a whole help us to more clearly understand Welty’s artistic commentary on her time and place, and how it unfolded in her photography and fiction over a timespan (1930s—1960s) when the country as a whole was moving towards increased social awareness.