"The highest roof in the world": Home Landscapes in Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter.

Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter , published in 1972, demonstrates an anxiety regarding the issue of region that is pervasive throughout the entirety of the novel. Welty focalizes her discourse of region through a distinction between the concept of home, embodied in the natural landscape of a particular place, and the infrastructure of a constructed house. While several critics have broached the topic of home and region in their readings of Welty, most of this scholarship conflates the idea of home with the construction of the house without seriously interrogating the difference between the two terms. In this paper, I will argue that such a conflation largely overlooks Welty's participation in a distinctly ecological discourse. For Welty, as for many contemporary ecocritical scholars, such as Timothy Clark and Leo Mellor, individual identity—and humanity by extent—can only thrive when properly connected to and appreciative of the surrounding environment, particularly an environment that constitutes a home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]