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The introduction explains how Canadian writer Rudy Wiebe’s idea of “the eye that is language” focuses the author’s explorations of just how it is that Welty writes fiction that resists easy meaning while delivering powerful truths. An analysis of the narrative techniques in Welty’s story “A Curtain of Green” argues that the artist figure and the artist’s territory are Welty’s primary concerns, most often through the powerful use of Perseus and Medusa.

This chapter reviews twentieth-century revolutions in aesthetics, science, and politics as witnessed by Eudora Welty and that are evident in her work: cubism, expressionism, surrealism, abstraction, futurism, psychology, fascism, totalitarianism, world wars, and poverty. With dozens of Welty’s fictions, nonfictions, and photographs including “Powerhouse,” “Kin,” Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, and “The Demonstrators,” the chapter describes Welty’s narrative techniques of displacement and transformation and her expression of two philosophies of art: emotion and vision. Picasso, Kandinsky, Freud, Cocteau, Buñuel, and Pollack are among the twentieth-century figures who resisted representation in favor of experimentation, new concepts, and techniques by which Welty created her art.

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This chapter focuses on Eudora Welty’s Losing Battles, The Optimist’s Daughter, and One Writer’s Beginnings to address the critical question of the future for literature by analyzing Barthes’ “moments of truth” in Welty’s late novels and autobiography. These long form texts, written between the late 1960s and 1984, demonstrate a marked shift in Welty’s point of view and techniques of form, a departure from the short story, to comprise a “new” period of her work in which the power of emotion and growing relationships are developed through the “interplay of memories, digressions, echoes, and uncertainty.” The “moments of truth” in the long form works of the renowned author prove the value of literature to transmit a probing investigation of the human spirit’s universal drive to commemorate, commiserate, and to thrive.