"Like an old song they carried in their memory": Eudora Welty's transformation of folklore in The Wide Net and other stories

This thesis looks at the importance of folklore in Eudora Welty's The Wide Net and Other Stories. Folklore fulfills several functions in this collection of stories: it connects the characters within the stories to their culture and the people around them as it highlights the differences between the stark real world and the idealistic folkloric world; folklore also creates a more realistic and relatable experience for the readers of Welty's fiction while Welty allows herself to intertwine her local folklore with more universally known folklore in order to show her respect for her local lore as she allows herself the freedom to expand her writing beyond Southern folklore. Eudora Welty takes folklore from all over the world in order to create settings and characters that seem familiar to her readers, no matter where those readers are from. She is able to take a folkloric ideal and translate it into modem Southern society, and in doing so, Welty creates a successful collection of stories which have folkloric referents and themes.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Author dc:creator

• Pendergrass, Leigh Anna

Contributors dc:contributor

• Noe, Marcia
• Prevost, Verbie; Smith, Joyce; Ingraham, Lauren
• College of Arts and Sciences

• Folklore in literature
• American literature--Southern States
• Welty, Eudora 1909-2001--Criticism and interpretation

Licence

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language

English, eng

Identifier

LB2369.2 .P462 2009

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholar.utc.edu:theses-2109