Book dossier

Eudora Welty's aesthetics of place

by Jan Nordby Gretlund

Eudora Welty's fiction has come out of a particular place and is based on the writer's familiarity with its people. Jan Nordby Gretlund suggests that there is an obvious need, in today's literary climate, to consider the historical and cultural background for Eudora Welty's literary achievement. Guided by her aesthetics of place and with an eye on biographical, political, and cultural developments, he sees Welty as an individual whose fiction represents the collective experience in the South from the Depression to the present. Welty's realistic fiction is read as her aesthetic declaration of allegiance to the values of traditional Agrarianism. And her fictional portraits of city-life are seen as showing individual failure as a part of general social failure. . In Jan Nordby Gretlund's analysis Eudora Welty's aesthetics of place is finally indistinguishable from the ethics of living in a place and finding one's identity in relation to it. In her fiction, existential decisions originate in the individual sense of place and community and have moral consequences. By focusing on her native place, remembering its past, identifying with it, and expressing its essence in fiction, Eudora Welty discovers and rediscovers her own self. The writer's imagination is bound to a place, which in the fiction becomes her "gateway to reality" and to a world of possibility.