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Discarding Dreams And Legends: The Short Fiction Of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, And Eudora Welty, Katy L. Leedy

Dissertations (1934 -)

This project examines four Southern women writers—Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty—who use the genre of the short story and the setting of the farm or insular living space to critique Southern regional identity. I argue that the social critiques of these southern female short story writers have been overlooked because stereotypes rooted in the fantasy of the idealized southern woman has limited critical perceptions of these authors’ engagements with cultural or political issues, when in reality their short fiction helped to influence the shifting expectations of the mid-twentieth century South. This study provides a …