A Study Guide for Eudora Welty's "Moon Lake," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
��Watch out for the mosquitoes,� they called to one another, lyrically because warning wasn�t any use anyway, as they walked out of their kimonos and dropped them like the petals of one big scattered flower on the bank behind them, and exposing themselves felt in a hundred places at once the little pangs.� Moon Lake is the story of a summer camp in Mississippi, a surly lifeguard, a rebellious orphan girl, and the fateful day when they learn the secrets of life and death. Pulitzer Prize-winner Eudora Welty�s extraordinary short story is a lushly atmospheric and acutely observed portrayal of the strange, surreal time between childhood and adulthood.
Whether "Why I Live at the P.O.," "Clytie," or "Moon Lake," a short story by Eudora Welty (b. 1909) is remarkable for its ability to convey the lyrical in everyday life, to offer haunting glimpses into the interior lives of individuals. Known for her marvelous ability to render the life and character of the deep South, Welty is particularly admired for her unfailing powers as an observer and her keen ear for the spoken word. In Eudora Welty: A Study of the Short Fiction, Carol Ann Johnston provides a first-rate guide to the writer's canon of short stories. Emphasizing the influence on Welty's literary craft of her work as a photographer for the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, Johnston presents a compelling appraisal of the writer's unique contributions to the tradition of the short story. An original approach to appreciating the accomplishments of a singular voice in American literature, Eudora Welty: A Study of the Short Fiction holds definite appeal for students and scholars of American literature, the short story, and Southern literature.
Eudora Welty: Thirteen Essays edited by Peggy W. Prenshaw This collection of essays about the writings of Eudora Welty, a southern writer in the grand tradition of American literature, reflects the range of Welty criticism. Themes, forms, and stylistic features in her work are given careful consideration by some of the most notable of Welty scholars: Chester E. Eisinger, John A. Allen, J. A. Bryant, Jr., John Edward Hardy, Albert J. Devlin, Warren French, Julia L. Demmin and Daniel Curley, Daniele Pitavy-Souques, Robert B. Heilman, Seymour L. Gross, Barbara McKenzie, Michael Kreyling, and Ruth M. Vande Kieft. The essays included in this volume were selected from the 1979 publication Eudora Welty: Critical Essays also edited by Peggy W. Prenshaw. Eudora Welty: Thirteen Essays retains the breadth of subject and approach that marked the earlier volume. Dr. Peggy W. Prenshaw is currently the Millsaps College Humanities Scholar in Residence. She recently retired from the Fred C. Frey Chair in Southern Studies at Louisiana State University. She has published widely on southern women writers, including Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Spencer.
This novel of a Mississippi family in the 1920s “presents the essence of the Deep South and does it with infinite finesse” (The Christian Science Monitor). From one of the most treasured American writers, winner of a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, comes Delta Wedding, a vivid and charming portrait of Southern life. Set in 1923, the story is centered on the Fairchilds, a big and clamorous family, who live on a plantation in the Mississippi delta. They are in the midst of planning their daughter’s wedding when a nine-year-old relative, Laura McRaven, whose mother has just died, comes to visit. Drama leads to drama, revelation to revelation, in a novel that is “nothing short of wonderful” (The New Yorker). The result is a sometimes-riotous view of a Southern family, and the parentless child who learns to become one of them.
Is Memphis on your list of possible places to relocate or visit? You’ll find this practical guide an essential resource for comprehensive information about this fast-growing city. Local author Rebecca Finlayson offers an unbiased perspective of Memphis and the area around it. Four maps and 30 black-and-white photographs complete the coverage.
Contributions by Jacob Agner, Susan V. Donaldson, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Stephen M. Fuller, Jean C. Griffith, Ebony Lumumba, Rebecca Mark, Donnie McMahand, Kevin Murphy, Harriet Pollack, Christin Marie Taylor, Annette Trefzer, and Adrienne Akins Warfield The year 2013 saw the publication of Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race, a collection in which twelve critics changed the conversation on Welty’s fiction and photography by mining and deciphering the complexity of her responses to the Jim Crow South. The thirteen diverse voices in New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race deepen, reflect on, and respond to those seminal discussions. These essays freshly consider such topics as Welty’s uses of African American signifying in her short stories and her attention to public street performances interacting with Jim Crow rules in her unpublished photographs. Contributors discuss her adaptations of gothic plots, haunted houses, Civil War stories, and film noir. And they frame Welty’s work with such subjects as Bob Dylan’s songwriting, the idea and history of the orphan in America, and standup comedy. They compare her handling of whiteness and race to other works by such contemporary writers as William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Chester Himes, and Alice Walker. Discussions of race and class here also bring her masterwork The Golden Apples and her novel Losing Battles, underrepresented in earlier conversations, into new focus. Moreover, as a group these essays provide insight into Welty as an innovative craftswoman and modernist technician, busily altering literary form with her frequent, pointed makeovers of familiar story patterns, plots, and genres.
The impulses that fired the Southern Literary Renaissance echoed the impetus behind the Irish Literary Revival at the turn of the twentieth century, when Ireland sought to demonstrate its cultural equality with any European nation and disentangle itself from English-imposed stereotypes. Seeking to prove that the South was indeed the cultural equal of greater America, despite the harsh realities of political defeat, economic scarcity, and racial strife, Southern writers embarked on a career to re-imagine the American South and to re-invent literary criticism. Transatlantic Renaissances: Literature of Ireland and the American South traces the influence of the Irish Revival upon the Southern Renaissance, exploring how the latter looked to the former for guidance, artistic innovation, and models for self-invention and regional renovation.While Deleuze and Guattari's model for minor literature refers to minority or regional authors who work within a major language for purposes of subversion, Artuso modifies their term along generic and thematic lines to refer to errant female juveniles within subsidiary genres whose nonconformist development threatens to disrupt the dominant patriarchal culture of a region or nation. Using the themes of initiation and maturation to anchor the book, Artuso analyzes how the volatile development of young women in revivalist texts often reflects or questions larger growth pangs and patterns, including the evolution of the literary revival itself and the development of a regional minority group that must work within a dominant culture, language, and nation while seeking methods of subversion. With minor literature as the container for undervalued genres such as popular fiction and short stories--often considered an author's juvenilia--this work investigates not only how these texts challenge the authoritative claims of the novel, but also scrutinizes the renaissance trope of female rebirth, as the revivalists often figured cultural, national, or regional regeneration through the metamorphoses or maturation of female protagonists such as Cathleen n Houlihan, Scarlett O'Hara, and Virgie Rainey. Drawing upon New Historical, New Critical, and postcolonial approaches, Artuso examines works by Lady Gregory, Margaret Mitchell, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Toomer, and James Joyce.
