Description
Book SynopsisExplores, 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.
Trade Review"A valuable contribution to Cather studies."—
CHOICE"Cather lovers in general, and especially those intrigued by Cather biography, will enjoy the ambitious plunge into the archive by many of these authors."—Kristen R. Egan,
Western American Literature"A major contribution to Cather scholarship."—Peter Betjemann,
American Literary RealismTable of ContentsList of Illustrations
Introduction
Anne L. Kaufman and Richard H. Millington
Part 1. Contexts
1. Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the Historiography of Lesbian Sexuality
Melissa J. Homestead
2. Cather’s Readers, Traditionalism, and Modern America
Charles Johanningsmeier
3. Time Out of Place: Modernity and the Rise of Environmentalism in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!
Leila C. Nadir
4. Contamination, Modernity, Health, and Art in Edith Wharton and Willa Cather
Susan Meyer
5. From Sentimentality to Sex: The Circus Motif in Willa Cather’s Writing
Steven B. Shively
6. Daughter of a War Lost, Won, and Evaded: Cather and the Ambiguities of the Civil War
Janis Stout
7. A [Slave] Girl’s Life in Virginia before the War: Willa Cather and Antebellum Nostalgia
John Jacobs
Part 2. Precursors and Influences
8. Cather’s Jewett: Relationship, Influence, and Representation
Deborah Carlin
9. Willa Cather and the Example of Henry James
Elsa Nettels
10. Kindred Spirits: Willa Cather and Henry James
John J. Murphy
11. The Rise of Godfrey St. Peter: Cather’s Modernism and the Howellsian Pretext
Joseph C. Murphy
12. Echoes of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage in Willa Cather’s One of Ours
Ann Moseley
13. Thackeray’s Henry Esmond and The Virginians: Literary Prototypes for My Mortal Enemy
Richard C. Harris
14. "One Knows It Too Well to Know It Well": Willa Cather, A. E. Housman, and A Shropshire Lad
Robert Thacker
15. Following the Lieder: Cather, Schubert, and Lucy Gayheart
David Porter
16. Pompeii and the House of the Tragic Poet in A Lost Lady
Matthew Hokom
17. Making It New: O Pioneers! as Modernist Bildungsroman
Sarah Stoeckl
Contributors
Index
