Description
Book SynopsisThe volume situates My Ántonia as a novel that stands the test of time by including in its pages an extraordinarily wide range of historical, cultural, literary, psychological, thematic, perceptual, and stylistic issues. The volume provides an analysis and assessment of complexities in the novel as well as its reception and legacy. The essays as a whole situate the novel at the cusp of the modern period, marking in myriad ways the novel’s transitional role between nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and culture. The first section “Translation” features writers that reflect on Cather’s curious devaluation of My Ántonia’s reception over time; translation issues in Germany, Italty, France, and Russia; and linguistic issues in the novel’s vision of Ántonia’s acculturation. The second section “Tradition” defines Cather’s relationship to modernism and regionalism through her career shifts and changes to the Introduction as well as her narrative technique in marginalizing violence and darkness to the edges of Jim’s consicousness. The third section “Transgender” analyzes Cather’s relationship to Hamlin Garland’s Life on the Prairie, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and the Neverland, and the work of Truman Capote, especially his gay protagoanist Joel Knox in Other Voices, Other Rooms. The fourth section “Transhuman” deploys work on hysteria to situate Cather’s vision of genderless desire and ecocritical lenses to understand Jim and nature. Finally the last section “Transition” discusses Lena Lingard’s presence as a New Woman and gift economies in the novel that underscore the community’s uneasy transition to twentieth-century capitalism. Gathered in the volume are an international group of scholars who demonstrate the novel’s centrality to women’s studies, American studies, queer studies, childhood studies, psychoanalysis, ecology, translation and reception, Marxism, narratology, and intertextuality.
Table of ContentsIntroduction. “Cather’s Sod House of Fiction,” by Holly Blackford Part I. Translation Chapter 1. “Willa Cather's Shifting Reactions to the Reception of My Ántonia: What the Letters Tell Us,” by Janis P. Stout Chapter 2. “People in countries who read it in the strangest languages”: the International Reception of My Ántonia,” by Caterina Bernardini Chapter 3. “Lost in Translation: The Mother Tongue in My Ántonia,” by Diane Prenatt Part II. Tradition Chapter 4. “Live Property”: Cather’s 1926 Revisions to the Introduction of My Ántonia and the Specter of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Regionalism,” by Melissa J. Homestead Chapter 5. “Violence in the Pastoral: Darkness in the Narrative Structure of My Ántonia,” by Sarah L. Young Part III. Transgender Chapter 6. “Boyhood and the Frontier: Nostalgia and Play in My Ántonia,” by Martin Woodside Chapter 7. “The Nebraskan Neverland: The Archeology of Children’s Fantasy Fiction in My Ántonia,” by Holly Blackford Chapter 8. “‘Obliterating Strangeness’: Cather, Capote, and the Burden of My Ántonia,” by Thomas Fahy Part III: Transhuman Chapter 9. “Beyond Gender, Between Persons: Intersubjective Desire in My Ántonia,” by Monroe Street Chapter 10. “The Image of Nature in the Past in My Ántonia,” by Fangyuan Xi Chapter 11. “My Ántonia: Keatsian Negative Capability and the Dissolution of Boundaries,” by Jim Cody Part IV: Transition Chapter 12. “A Portrait of a Self-Made Woman: Lena Lingard in My Ántonia,” by Keiko Arai Chapter 13. “The Gift Economies of My Ántonia,” by Dana Woodcock and Zachary Tavlin Bibliography About the Contributors
