Fish Stories: Revising Masculine Ritual in Eudora Welty’s The Wide Net

Examines Welty’s revision and parody of modernist masculinity in her 1942 story, treating the story as a response to male contemporaries such as Eliot, Faulkner, and Hemingway who consistently wrote on the theme of men living without women. McWhirter explores Nick Adams’s need for control and flight from women’s reproductive functions in several In Our Time stories, particularly “Indian Camp” and “Big Two-Hearted River.