Eudora Welty and Modern Media by Harriet Pollack

Eudora Welty and Modern Media by Harriet Pollack

Contributions by Jacob Agner, Stephen M. Fuller, Ebony Lumumba, Pearl McHaney, Donnie McMahand, David McWhirter, Kevin Murphy, Harriet Pollack, Kaitlyn Smith, Matthew D. Sutton, Christin Marie Taylor, Annette Trefzer, and Keri Watson

As a child, Eudora Welty rode trains, listened to music on her parents' Victrola, and absorbed the magic of early sound technology. In her twenties, she developed a passion for photography and supported Mississippi’s first radio station, WJDX—founded by her father. Later, she would use her first literary prize money to purchase a state-of-the-art radio console, infuse her fiction with popular songs, and collaborate with woman-owned Caedmon Records to bring modernist literature into the world of recorded sound. These engagements with mass media formed a foundational part of Welty’s creative life, yet they have been largely understudied—until now.

Eudora Welty and Modern Media brings together eleven original essays that explore Welty’s wide-ranging engagement with twentieth-century technologies and forms of communication, including photography, radio, the recording industry, contemporary visual arts, film, advertising, magazine and fashion culture, journalism, and television. Edited by Harriet Pollack, the collection reframes Welty as a modernist innovator—akin to William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, or James Joyce—but who, as a Mississippi woman welcoming change, embraced the new rather than retreated from it. As Eliot reimagined poetry and Joyce redefined the novel, Welty transformed the American short story in tandem with the shifting media landscape of her time.

Harriet Pollack, College of Charleston, is author of Eudora Welty’s Fiction and Photography: The Body of the Other Woman; editor of New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race; Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race; and Having Our Way: Women Rewriting Tradition in Twentieth-Century America; and coeditor (with Jacob Agner) of Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden In Plain Sight, (with Christopher Metress) of Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination, and (with Suzanne Marrs) of Eudora Welty and Politics: Did the Writer Crusade? She now serves as editor of University Press of Mississippi’s book series Critical Perspectives on Eudora Welty. She has twice served as president of the Eudora Welty Society, has codirected four international Welty conferences including the 2009 Centennial, and in 2008 received the Phoenix Award for outstanding contributions to Welty scholarship.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781496862396
ISBN 10	1496862392
Title	Eudora Welty and Modern Media
Author	Harriet Pollack
Series	Critical Perspectives On Eudora Welty
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University Press of Mississippi
Year published	2026-08-17
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.