Peeled Bananas, Hot Shrimp, and Honeysuckle on Trains, Buses, Wagons, and Automobiles: Symbolic Sexual Trans/Portations in Eudora Welty’s Fiction

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Each of the texts that I am explicating has a long history of feminist, gendered, and queer critical readings by Welty scholars over at least a half a century. I am including a short list of the essays and books that have influenced my reading, but this is certainly not an exhaustive list: Susan Donaldson’s “Gender and History in Eudora Welty’s” Delta Wedding“; Suzan Harrison, Eudora Welty and Virginia Woolf: Gender, Genre, and Influence; Sarah Fords’ work on Losing Battles has transformed the way we can think about the novel including her two essays: “Rewriting Violence in Eudora Welty’s Losing Battles’” and “Of Trains And Relativity: Einstein And Perspective In Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding”; Suzanne’s Marr’s One Writer’s Imagination: the Fiction of Eudora Welty and Eudora Welty: A Biography have influenced all Welty critics’ understanding of the life of the author; Gail Mortimer, Daughter of the Swan: Love and Knowledge in Eudora Welty’s Fiction”; Donnie McMahand and Kevin Murphy’s “The Traveling Word: Eudora Welty’s Literary Correspondence with the Postal South” have expanded the areas of focus that critics can explore in Welty’s fiction; Harriet Pollack’s Eudora Welty’s Fiction and Photography: The Body of the Other Woman, multiple essays addressing each of these texts, and her edited volumes have redefined gender in Welty criticism for generations to come; Peggy Prenshaw’s life work on Welty’s fiction including as the editor of Conversations with Eudora Welty, and multiple essays addressing gender, race, and politics including “The Political Thought of Eudora Welty” have defined the field of Welty studies; Patricia S. Yaeger groundbreaking essay, “The Case of the Dangling Signifier: Phallic Imagery in Eudora Welty’s ‘Moon Lake’”; Axel Nissen’s paradigm shifting “Queer Welty, Camp Welty.” Dawn Trouard’s early feminist readings of Welty and her daring “The Promiscuous Joy of Eudora Welty: Missing Bowen in Mississippi” have challenged our conventional readings in every decade; Brannon Costello has opened up the way we write about Narciss and Bonnie Dee in the Ponder Heart in his important essay, “Playing Lady and Imitating Aristocrats: Race, Class, and Money in Delta Wedding and The Ponder Heart”.