Synopses & Reviews
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.
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
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
Anne L. Kaufman teaches mathematics at Milton Academy and is a visiting lecturer in English at Bridgewater State University. Her work has appeared in
Western American Literature,
Canadian Literature,
Western Historical Quarterly, and elsewhere. Richard H. Millington is Helen and Laura Shedd Professor of English at Smith College. He is the author of essays on Catherand#8217;s modernism and of
Practicing Romance: Narrative Form and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorneand#8217;s Fiction, and he is the editor of
The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Norton Critical Edition of Hawthorneand#8217;s
The Blithedale Romance.