Cather Studies, Volume 11: Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux (Cather Studies ) (Paperback)
Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux examines Willa Cather’s position in time, in aesthetics, and in the world. Born a Victorian in 1873, Cather made herself a modernist through the poems, stories, and novels she wrote and published into the twentieth century. Beginning with a prologue locating Cather’s position, this volume of Cather Studies offers three sets of related essays.
The first section takes up Cather’s beginnings with her late nineteenth-century cultural influences. The second section explores a range of discernible direct connections with contemporary artists (Howard Pyle, Frederic Remington, and Ernest Blumenschein) and others who figured in the making of her texts. The third section focuses on The Song of the Lark, a novel that confirms Cather’s shift westward and elaborates her emergent modernism. An epilogue by the editors of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather addresses how the recent availability of these letters has transformed Cather studies. Altogether, these essays detail Cather’s shaping of the world of the early twentieth century and later into a singular modernism born of both inherited and newer cultural traditions.
The first section takes up Cather’s beginnings with her late nineteenth-century cultural influences. The second section explores a range of discernible direct connections with contemporary artists (Howard Pyle, Frederic Remington, and Ernest Blumenschein) and others who figured in the making of her texts. The third section focuses on The Song of the Lark, a novel that confirms Cather’s shift westward and elaborates her emergent modernism. An epilogue by the editors of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather addresses how the recent availability of these letters has transformed Cather studies. Altogether, these essays detail Cather’s shaping of the world of the early twentieth century and later into a singular modernism born of both inherited and newer cultural traditions.
Ann Moseley is the William L. Mayo Professor and professor emerita of literature and languages at Texas A&M University–Commerce. John J. Murphy is professor emeritus at Brigham Young University. Robert Thacker is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Canadian Studies and English at St. Lawrence University.
"The essays that comprise Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux are a welcome addition to the ongoing assessment of the author's career and her contributions to modern US literature."—Susan Naramore Maher, American Literary History
“The essays selected for the volume—in all cases substantial and thoughtful, in some cases exhilarating in their intellectual richness and scope—valuably deepen, complicate, and extend the account of the precise nature of Cather’s modernism.”—Richard Millington, coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Essential reading in the field. . . . These essays point the way toward a new generation of Cather scholarship.”—Daryl Palmer, author of Writing Russia in the Age of Shakespeare
“The essays selected for the volume—in all cases substantial and thoughtful, in some cases exhilarating in their intellectual richness and scope—valuably deepen, complicate, and extend the account of the precise nature of Cather’s modernism.”—Richard Millington, coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Essential reading in the field. . . . These essays point the way toward a new generation of Cather scholarship.”—Daryl Palmer, author of Writing Russia in the Age of Shakespeare