Eudora Welty and Mystery

Jacob Agner is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Mississippi. As a recipient of the Eudora Welty Research Fellowship, funded by the Eudora Welty Foundation and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, he has examined the writer's correspondence for connections to film history. Harriet Pollack, College of Charleston, is author of Eudora Welty's Fiction and Photography: The Body of the Other Woman and editor of New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race; Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race; Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination (with Christopher Metress); Eudora Welty and Politics: Did the Writer Crusade? (with Suzanne Marrs); and Having Our Way: Women Rewriting Tradition in Twentieth-Century America. She now serves as editor of University Press of Mississippi's book series Critical Perspectives on Eudora Welty. She has twice served as president of the Eudora Welty Society, has directed three international Welty conferences including the 2009 Centennial, and in 2008 received the Phoenix Award for outstanding contributions to Welty scholarship.

This collection of essays invites a new way to perceive the differences between literary genres, as well as how women authors can use the tropes of a particular genre to expose the problems that underly them.--Eunice Kim, Claremont Graduate University "Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal" The prose is accessible throughout. . . . Welty scholars will enjoy these well-argued pieces.-- "Publishers Weekly" Eudora Welty and Mystery sheds abundant light on this confluence, demonstrating Welty's ingenious way of signifying on noir tropes in particular and the mystery genre in general, exposing the injustices that lie beneath the surface - whether that of respectable Southern society or the implicit assumptions that have dominated the books and movies that have been consumed for decades. This collection of essays invites a new way to perceive the differences between literary genres, as well as how women authors can use the tropes of a particular genre to expose the problems that underly them--Eunice Kim "Women's Studies" Eudora Welty and Mystery's core strength, then, lies in what it is and is not. It is a tour de force, a must-read for those in the Welty world and adjacent fields. What it is not is limited to that community. The book is well written, digestible, at times even riveting, especially for anyone with a taste for mysteries, crime fiction, and noir variations. In toto, the collection is a veritable treasure trove of innovative scholarship that will inevitably produce more sleuths working to decipher Welty's puzzle-texts that are often simply hidden in plain sight.--Rebecca L. Harrison "Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers" As the nine essays in Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight illustrate in multiple ways, Welty's mysteries are most certainly of the wild kind. The essays plumb the depths of the risks and rewards of "serious daring" (Words 104), of love and anger, of horror and delight in Welty's life and fiction. This collection reveals in new ways Welty's talent for eluding the critical and biographical confines we seek to impose upon her. Eudora Welty continues to be wilder than we expect.--Suzan Harrison "Women's Studies" In this sparkling collection, editors Jacob Agner and Harriet Pollack set out to show, in their own words, "that Welty was both a pupil to the mystery genre and a practitioner too" (22). In this effort, they and their nine fellow contributors succeed abundantly. . . . Not the least of this volume's rewards is that it makes Welty so fun.--Jay Watson "Eudora Welty Review" For mystery-crime enthusiasts, this is an enlightening guidebook to an intriguing journey. . . . A mystery woman in many respects, [Eudora Welty] was also--it turns out--an unapologetic fangirl.--Pat H. Broeske "Mystery Scene" Eudora Welty and Mystery constitutes an unexpected, surprising, but productive approach to the works of a major American twentieth-century writer.--David McWhirter, professor of English at Texas A&M University Focusing on the influence exerted by the mystery/detective fiction genre on Welty's writing, Eudora Welty and Mystery unambiguously opens an overlooked and original avenue of inquiry. The essays powerfully evoke Welty, the late modernist caught in a postmodernist pose, and showcase some of her best critics patiently and cleverly teasing out various textual refractions and echoes.--Stephen M. Fuller, author of Eudora Welty and Surrealism