Welty: Reviews And Criticism

On a 1943 novel about Uruguay by Enrique Amorim, the author of The Robber Bridegroom writes: among the scenes burned into the mind is the blind gaucho\u27s story of the night he spent in the tree, while the flooding river ran and humped like a bucking horse below him, while the tree itself was a Noah\u27s ark of refugees, wildcats and snakes and himself all clinging there together (p. 13). The issue of how to define the American women\u27s tradition within which and against which Welty wrote has been examined by readers as different as Peggy Prenshaw, Nina Baym, Carol Manning, Louise Wesding, Susan V. Donaldson, or Rachel Blau DuPlessis, many of whom are represented in an excellent anthology of essays edited by Carol S. Manning, The Female Tradition in Southern Literature (Illinois, 1993), that has a broad historical scope and is filled with insightful references to Welty\u27s fiction in this broader context