Cather Studies, Volume 8

by Cather Studies

Published 1 January 2010
The essays in Cather Studies, Volume 8 explore the many locales and cultures informing Willa Cather's fiction. A lifelong Francophile, Cather first visited France in 1902 and returned repeatedly throughout her life. Her visits to France influenced not only her writing but also her interpretation of other worlds: for example, while visiting the American Southwest in 1912, a region that informed her subsequent works, she first viewed that landscape through the prism of her memories of Provence. Cather's intellectual intercourse between the Old and the New World was a two-way street, moving both people and cultural mores between the two. But her worlds extended far beyond France, or even geographical locations. This new volume pairs Cather innovatively with additional influences-theological, aesthetic, even gastronomical-and examines her as tourist and traveler cautiously yet assiduously exploring a diverse range of places, ethnicities, and professions.

Cather Studies, Volume 10

by Cather Studies

Published 1 August 2015

Willa Cather and the Nineteenth Century explores, with textual specificity and historical alertness, the question of how the cultures of the nineteenth century—the cultures that shaped Willa Cather’s childhood, animated her education, supplied her artistic models, generated her inordinate ambitions, and gave embodiment to many of her deeply held values—are addressed in her fiction.

In two related sets of essays, seven contributors track within Cather’s life or writing the particular cultural formations, emotions, and conflicts of value she absorbed from the atmosphere of her distinct historical moment; their ten colleagues offer a compelling set of case studies that articulate the manifold ways that Cather learned from, built upon, or resisted models provided by particular nineteenth-century writers, works, or artistic genres. Taken together with its Cather Studies predecessor, Willa Cather and Modern Cultures, this volume reveals Cather as explorer and interpreter, sufferer and master of the transition from a Victorian to a Modernist America.


This book presents new interpretative approaches to Willa Cather based on materials now available in the Drew University Cather Collection. The scholars writing here came from many states to begin mapping unexplored territory. The purpose of this volume is to suggest the work left to do on Willa Cather, and the diverse directions in which scholars now must travel.

Cather Studies, Volume 3

by Cather Studies

Published 1 November 2003
Volume 3 of Cather Studies demonstrates the range of topics and approaches in contemporary discussions of Willa Cather's work for the informed reader or the specialized student. In fourteen essays, critics and scholars examine Cather's Catholic Progressivism, her literary relations with William Faulkner, and her place in the multicultural canon of American literature.

Volume 1 of Cather Studies demonstrates the range of topics and approaches in contemporary discussions of Willa Cather’s work for the informed reader or the specialized student.Twelve contributors discuss topics ranging from Cather's pictorial sources to her familiarity with Dante and Russian literature.

Cather Studies, Volume 4

by Cather Studies

Published 1 December 1999
Cather Studies 4 contains eighteen essays and elaborates a theme, "Willa Cather's Canadian and Old World Connections." Such connections are central to Cather's art and artistry. She transported much from the Old World to the New, shaping her antecedents to tell, in new ways, the stories of Nebraska, of the American Southwest, and especially of Quebec, in Shadows on the Rock. David Stouck details Cather's numerous Canadian connections, Richard Millington treats her "anthropological" re-creation of the cultural moment of seventeenth-century Quebec, and Francois Palleau-Papin finds "The Hidden French in Cather's English." A volume of lively and informed criticism, Cather Studies 4 vividly demonstrates Cather's artistry and her work's deep connections to the present cultural and critical moment.

Cather Studies, Volume 9

by Cather Studies

Published 1 January 2011
Linking Willa Cather to "the modern" or "modernism" still seems an eccentric proposition to some people. Born in 1873, Cather felt tied to the past when she witnessed the emergence of twentieth-century modern culture, and the clean, classical sentences in her fiction contrast starkly with the radically experimental prose of prominent modernists. Nevertheless, her representations of place in the modern world reveal Cather as a writer able to imagine a startling range of different cultures.
Divided into two sections, the essays in Cather Studies, Volume 9 examine Willa Cather as an author with an innovative receptivity to modern cultures and a powerful affinity with the visual and musical arts. From the interplay between modern and antimodern in her representations of native culture to the music and visual arts that animated her imagination, the essays are unified by an understanding of Cather as a writer of transition whose fiction meditates on the cultural movement from Victorianism into the twentieth century.

Cather Studies, Volume 6

by Cather Studies

Published 1 January 2006
Cather Studies 6 is part of a growing body of scholarship that seeks to undo Willa Cather's longstanding reputation as a writer who remained aloof from the cultural issues of her day. This chronologically arranged collection demonstrates that Cather found the subject of war both unavoidable, because of her position in history, and artistically irresistible. The volume begins with an essay addressing the American Civil War as part of Cather's southern cultural inheritance and concludes with an account of the aging writer's participation in the Armed Services Editions Program of World War II. Military matters surface not only in One of Ours and The Professor's House, Cather's two major contributions to the literature of World War I, but in most of her other works as well, including My Antonia, in which the Plains Indian Wars and the Spanish-American conflict of 1898 are subtly but significantly evoked, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Cather's largely ironic contribution to the genre of southern "Lost Cause" fiction. Containing essays by leading Cather scholars, such as Ann Romines and Janis Stout, and work by specialists in war literature, whose inclusion expands the number and range of critical perspectives, this volume breaks new ground.

Cather Studies, Volume 11

by Cather Studies

Published 1 August 2017
Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux examines Willa Cather’s position in time, in aesthetics, and in the world. Born a Victorian in 1873, Cather made herself a modernist through the poems, stories, and novels she wrote and published into the twentieth century. Beginning with a prologue locating Cather’s position, this volume of Cather Studies offers three sets of related essays.

The first section takes up Cather’s beginnings with her late nineteenth-century cultural influences. The second section explores a range of discernible direct connections with contemporary artists (Howard Pyle, Frederic Remington, and Ernest Blumenschein) and others who figured in the making of her texts. The third section focuses on The Song of the Lark, a novel that confirms Cather’s shift westward and elaborates her emergent modernism. An epilogue by the editors of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather addresses how the recent availability of these letters has transformed Cather studies. Altogether, these essays detail Cather’s shaping of the world of the early twentieth century and later into a singular modernism born of both inherited and newer cultural traditions.
 

Cather Studies, Volume 7

by Cather Studies

Published 1 November 2007
Volume 7 of the Cather Studies series explores Willa Cather's iconic status and its problems within popular and literary culture. Not only are Cather's own life and work subject to enshrinement, but as a writer, she herself often returned to the motifs of canonization and to the complex relationship between the onlooker and the idealized object. Through textual study of her published novels and her behind-the-scenes campaign and publicity writing in service of her novels, the reader comes to understand the extent to which, despite her legendary claims and commitment to privacy, Willa Cather helped to orchestrate her own iconic status.

Cather Studies, Volume 2

by Cather Studies

Published 1 September 1993
Volume 2 of Cather Studies demonstrates the range of topics and approaches in contemporary discussions of Willa Cather's work for the informed reader or the specialized student.This volume includes major essays on Cather's response to the cultural pessimism of Oswald Spengler, her affinities to Alphonse Daudet, and aspects of her art in My Antonia, The Professor's House, and Shadows on the Rock.

Cather Studies, Volume 12

by Cather Studies

Published 1 January 2020
Over the five decades of her writing career Willa Cather responded to, and entered into dialogue with, shifts in the terrain of American life. These cultural encounters informed her work as much as the historical past in which much of her writing is based. Cather was a multifaceted cultural critic, immersing herself in the arts, broadly defined: theater and opera, art, narrative, craft production. Willa Cather and the Arts shows that Cather repeatedly engaged with multiple forms of art, and that even when writing about the past she was often addressing contemporary questions.

The essays in this volume are informed by new modes of contextualization, including the increasingly popular view of Cather as a pivotal or transitional figure working between and across very different cultural periods and by the recent publication of Cather's correspondence. The collection begins by exploring the ways Cather encountered and represented high and low cultures, including Cather's use of "racialized vernacular" in Sapphira and the Slave Girl. The next set of essays demonstrates how historical research, often focusing on local features in Cather's fiction, contributes to our understanding of American culture, from musicological sources to the cultural development of Pittsburgh. The final trio of essays highlights current Cather scholarship, including a food studies approach to O Pioneers! and an examination of Cather's use of ancient philosophy in The Professor's House. Together the essays reassess Cather's lifelong encounter with, and interpretation and reimagining of, the arts.