(De)Coding the Church: Christian Performance and White Southern Girlhood in Welty's One Writer's Beginnings

dc.contributorWhite, Heather
dc.contributorSimmons, K. Merinda
dc.contributor.advisorCrank, James A.
dc.contributor.authorPerschall, Abigail
dc.contributor.otherUniversity of Alabama Tuscaloosa
dc.date.accessioned2021-11-23T14:34:37Z
dc.date.available2021-11-23T14:34:37Z
dc.date.issued2021
dc.descriptionElectronic Thesis or Dissertationen_US
dc.description.abstractEudora Welty’s memoir One Writer’s Beginnings conveys the author’s childhood enchantment with reading and education. Critical engagement with the text often centers its impact on readings of her fiction or Welty’s relationship to other memoirists. I argue, however, that One Writer’s Beginnings also reveals a departure from southern belle-styled femininity through Welty’s interactions with formal schooling and the Church. Her family’s comparatively secular position in such a conservative, Christian population distinguishes Welty’s positionality from many of her immediate peers, making her a unique example of Christianity’s secular reach throughout the South. Her memoir is of particular interest because it presents historical verisimilitude as negotiated through the author’s self-definition, which adds another dimension to existing studies of Welty’s life. Examining the ways Welty narrates the extremes of women’s publicly available identities and the class performance inherent in church membership, I trace the young author’s abandonment of the southern belle archetype through her critique of her childhood Jackson, Mississippi and its religious practices.en_US
dc.format.mediumelectronic
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdf
dc.identifier.otherhttp://purl.lib.ua.edu/181526
dc.identifier.otheru0015_0000001_0003965
dc.identifier.otherPerschall_alatus_0004M_14517
dc.identifier.urihttp://ir.ua.edu/handle/123456789/8197
dc.languageEnglish
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.publisherUniversity of Alabama Libraries
dc.relation.hasversionborn digital
dc.relation.ispartofThe University of Alabama Electronic Theses and Dissertations
dc.relation.ispartofThe University of Alabama Libraries Digital Collections
dc.rightsAll rights reserved by the author unless otherwise indicated.en_US
dc.subjectautobiography
dc.subjectchristianity
dc.subjectmemoir
dc.subjectreligion
dc.subjectsouth
dc.title(De)Coding the Church: Christian Performance and White Southern Girlhood in Welty's One Writer's Beginningsen_US
dc.typethesis
dc.typetext
etdms.degree.departmentUniversity of Alabama. Department of English
etdms.degree.disciplineAmerican literature
etdms.degree.grantorThe University of Alabama
etdms.degree.levelmaster's
etdms.degree.nameM.A.
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