Delta Wedding

First edition (publ. Harcourt Brace)

Delta Wedding is a 1946 Southern fiction novel by Eudora Welty. Set in 1923, the novel tells of the experiences of the Fairchild family in a domestic-drama filled week leading up to Dabney Fairchild's wedding to the family overseer, Troy Flavin, during an otherwise unexceptional year in the Mississippi Delta.^[1] The novel's focus on the mundane and social life of the central South elicited considerable critique from contemporary critics.^[1][2]

Reception[]

Initial reception of the novel was chequered, with many reviewers challenging the absence of plot.^[1] The New York Times praised the characterization of the novel. It describes the novel as going "deep into the motives and moods and compulsions that move her characters".

The interplay of family life, with a dozen different people saying and doing a dozen different things all at the same time, is wonderfully handled by Miss Welty so that no detail is lost, every detail had its place in the pattern of the whole. The transitions are so smoothly made that you seem to be all over the place at once, knowing the living members of three generations and all the skeletons and ghosts. ^[3]

References[]

Further reading[]

• Crews, Claire Elizabeth (2012). The Role of the Home in Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding and the Optimist's Daughter (PhD Dissertation). Georgia State University.
• Sultzbach, Kelly (Fall 2009). "The Chiasmic Embrace of the Natural World in Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding". The Southern Literary Journal. 42 (1): 88–101. doi:10.1353/slj.0.0056.
• Wallace, James R. (2009). Taking Eudora Welty's Text Out of the Closet: Delta Wedding's George Fairchild and the Queering of Saint George (thesis). Georgia State University.

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