Description
Book SynopsisBeginning with an examination of Willa Cather's Virginia childhood and the southern influences that continued to mold her during the Nebraska years, Joyce McDonald traces the effects of those influences in Cather's novels.
Trade ReviewIn associating Cather with the past grandeur and defeat of the South and detecting in her fiction an undertone of historical irony, McDonald successfully places Cather in a larger world than the pioneering American one with which she has been identified."" - John J. Murphy, Brigham Young University
""McDonald succeeds in establishing both the importance and the relevance of those formative years before the Nebraska experience that scholars have so emphasized for several decades. . . . The Stuff of Our Forebears is a readable, insightful addition to Cather scholarship."" - Bruce P. Baker II, University of Nebraska
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1. Cather's Southern Heritage and Pastoral Origins
- 2. Cather's New World Pastorals
- 3. The Pangs of Disillusionment: Cather's Antipastoral Subtext
- 4. For Their Own Good: Cather's Pastoral Histories
- 5. History and Memory: Cather's Garden of the Chattel
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
