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Viewing report
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The World of Women Hunts Me. Edition No. 1
VDM Publishing House, May 2009, Pages: 244
It is rare to find a man writing perceptively about
Eudora Welty’s links with feminism:she herself did
not want to be too directly associated with any
such “movement”,but many female critics have
appropriated her as an early feminist, and her
novels are widely read and studied as if they were
part of a feminist agenda rather than, as Dr Habeeb,
shows us, as part of an ongoing and rich tradition
of writing which happens to be by women. Where other
male critics have looked at Welty’s southern-ness,
her spiritual journeys, her microcosms, Dr Habeeb
tackles more complex issues and tropes–Welty’s
metaphors, her use of masculine discourse,her
playing with dreams and such-like magic. He places
her rightly in a southern tradition, but he daringly
takes that tradition back to writers from far
outside the American south.
This is a major contribution to studies of Eudora
Welty’s fiction, but more than that it also claims a
place in writing about feminism and women’s fiction
which transcends gender studies and roles, as Welty
herself would surely have wished.
John McRae,Special Professor of Language in
Literature,University of Nottingham,England.
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