?Manning's book is an important addition to Welty studies in its detailed exploration of the complexity of this Southern writer's use of the oral tradition, both as a technique and as a theme. Her assessment of Welty as a comic realist' who repeatedly examines the Southerner's propensity to romanticize the past through storytelling is convincing, as is her explanation of the needs such storytelling fulfills. Manning relates this oral tradition to earlier narrative traditions, most notably to the classical mythology that informs so much of Welty's early fiction from A Curtain of Green (1941) to The Golden Apples (1949). This reviewer believes the chapter on The Optimist's Daughter to be the best commentary on that novel to date....?-Choice