Synopses & Reviews
Just as the explosive growth of digital media has led to ever-expanding narrative possibilities and practices, so these new electronic modes of storytelling have, in their own turn, demanded a rapid and radical rethinking of narrative theory. This timely volume takes up the challenge, deeply and broadly considering the relationship between digital technology and narrative theory in the face of the changing landscape of computer-mediated communication.
New Narratives reflects the diversity of its subject by bringing together some of the foremost practitioners and theorists of digital narratives. It extends the range of digital subgenres examined by narrative theorists to include forms that have become increasingly prominent, new examples of experimental hypertext, and contemporary video games. The collection also explicitly draws connections between the development of narrative theory, technological innovation, and the use of narratives in particular social and cultural contexts.
Finally, New Narratives focuses on how the tools provided by new technologies may be harnessed to provide new ways of both producing and theorizing narrative. Truly interdisciplinary, the book offers broad coverage of contemporary narrative theory, including frameworks that draw from classical and postclassical narratology, linguistics, and media studies.
Review
"Cather Studies continues to assemble and inspire the most well-informed writing on Willa Cather's life and literature. The twenty-three essays in this volume further elevate Cather's reputation for meticulous attention to detail when presenting various cultures in her fiction."and#8212;Derek Driedger, Great Plains Quarterly
Review
"Cather Studies has long been the repository of worthwhile scholarship, and this eighth volume does not disappoint. Catherians who missed the European seminar will learn much from this readable, revelatory, and elegantly designed volume."and#8212;Timothy W. Bintrim, Western American Literature
Review
"The scholarly authority with which the contributors approach their subjects reinforces the notion of Cather as a sophisticated 20th-century artist."and#8212;K. P.Ljungquist, CHOICE
Review
"The ninth volume of Cather Studies transcends the usual tendency to classify Cather as modern here and antimodern there, more interestingly highlighting tensions with modernism itself."and#8212;Stefanie Heron, Great Plains Quarterly
Synopsis
Willa Cather and the Nineteenth Century explores, with textual specificity and historical alertness, the question of how the cultures of the nineteenth centuryand#8212;the cultures that shaped Willa Catherand#8217;s childhood, animated her education, supplied her artistic models, generated her inordinate ambitions, and gave embodiment to many of her deeply held valuesand#8212;are addressed in her fiction.
In two related sets of essays, seven contributors track within Catherand#8217;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.
Synopsis
The essays in Cather Studies, Volume 8 explore the many locales and cultures informing Willa Catherand#8217;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. Catherand#8217;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 influencesand#8212;theological, aesthetic, even gastronomicaland#8212;and examines her as tourist and traveler cautiously yet assiduously exploring a diverse range of places, ethnicities, and professions.
Synopsis
Linking Willa Cather to and#8220;the modernand#8221; or and#8220;modernismand#8221; 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.and#160;
About the Author
John J. Murphy is a professor emeritus at Brigham Young University. He is the volume editor of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop (Nebraska 1999) and coeditor of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of Shadows on the Rock (Nebraska 2005). Franand#231;oise Palleau-Papin teaches American literature at the Universitand#233; de la Sorbonne Nouvelle and is the author of This Is Not a Tragedy: The Works of David Markson. Robert Thacker is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Canadian Studies and English at St. Lawrence University. He is the author of The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination and the coeditor of Cather Studies, Volume 4: Willa Catherand#8217;s Canadian and Old World Connections (Nebraska 1999).and#160;Contributors: Manuel Broncano, Marc Chand#233;netier, Joshua Dolezal, Mathieu Duplay, Stand#233;phanie Durrans, Evelyn I. Funda, Cristina Giorcelli, Richard C. Harris, Melissa J. Homestead, Andrew Jewell, Jean-Franand#231;ois Leroux, Mark Madigan, Ann Moseley, John J. Murphy, Joseph C. Murphy, Elsa Nettels, Julie Olin-Ammentorp, Franand#231;oise Palleau-Papin, Charles A. Peek, David H. Porter, Diane Prenatt, Ann Romines, Janet Sharistanian, Merrill Maguire Skaggs, John N. Swift, Robert Thacker, and Joseph Urgo.