Other American Studies Commons^™

“Reporters Gone Wild” Reporters And Their Critics On Hurricane Katrina, Gender, Race & Place, Steven Classen

Faculty Publications - Department of Communication and Cinematic Arts

The great fiction of the southern United States is frequently characterized by its passionate embrace of place. In her classic essay, “Place in Fiction,” the widely beloved Mississippi author Eudora Welty writes, “Place in history partakes of feeling, as feeling about history partakes of place. Feelings are bound up in place. Location is the ground conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction that charge out from the story in its course.”

Welty's rich stories evoke larger traditions of southern art and everyday culture imbued with multifaceted understandings of place. Starting with Welty's insight, in this …