Cather Studies Volume 10

Willa Cather and the Nineteenth Century explores, 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. In two related sets of essays, seven contributors track within Cather'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.

"Volume of essays exploring how nineteenth-century culture shaped Willa Cather's childhood, supplied her artistic models, generated her inordinate ambitions, and gave embodiment to the deeply held values present in her fiction"--

Willa Cather wrote about the places she knew, including Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, and Virginia. Often forgotten among these essential locations has been Pittsburgh. During the ten years Pittsburgh was her home (1896-1906), Cather worked as an editor, journalist, teacher, and freelance writer. She mixed with all sorts of people and formed friendships both ephemeral and lasting. She published extensively--and not just profiles and reviews but also a collection of poetry, April Twilights, and more than thirty short stories, including several collected in The Troll Garden that are now considered masterpieces: "A Death in the Desert," "The Sculptor's Funeral," "A Wagner Matinee," and "Paul's Case." During extended working vacations through 1916, she finished four novels in Pittsburgh. Cather Studies, Volume 13 explores the myriad ways that these crucial years in Pittsburgh shaped Cather's writing career and the artistic, professional, and personal connections she made there. With contributions from fourteen well-known Cather scholars, this collection of essays recognizes the importance Pittsburgh played in Cather's life and work and deepens our appreciation of how her art examines and elucidates the human experience.

Volume 7 of the Cather Studies series explores Willa Cather’s iconic status and its problems within popular and literary culture. Not only are Cather’s own life and work subject to enshrinement, but as a writer, she herself often returned to the motifs of canonization and to the complex relationship between the onlooker and the idealized object. Through textual study of her published novels and her behind-the-scenes campaign and publicity writing in service of her novels, the reader comes to understand the extent to which, despite her legendary claims and commitment to privacy, Willa Cather helped to orchestrate her own iconic status.

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Introduction: Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux -- Prologue: Gifts from the Museum: Catherian Epiphanies in Context -- Part 1. Beginnings -- 1. The Compatibility of Art and Religion for Willa Cather: From the Beginning -- 2. Thea in Wonderland: Willa Cather's Revision of the Alice Novels and the Gender Codes of the Western Frontier -- 3. Ántonia and Hiawatha: Spectacles of the Nation -- Part 2. Presences -- 4. Willa Cather, Howard Pyle, and "The Precious Message of Romance"--5. "Then a Great Man in American Art": Willa Cather's Frederic Remington -- 6. Willa Cather, Ernest L. Blumenschein, and "The Painting of Tomorrow" -- 7. From The Song of the Lark to Lucy Gayheart, and Die Walküre to Die Winterreise -- 8. The Trafficking of Mrs. Forrester: Prostitution and Willa Cather's A Lost Lady -- 9. The Outlandish Hands of Fred Demmler: Pittsburgh Prototypes in The Professor's House -- 10. Translating the Southwest: The 1940 French Edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop -- Part 3. Articulation: The Song of the Lark -- 11. Elements of Modernism in The Song of the Lark -- 12. "The Earliest Sources of Gladness": Reading the Deep Map of Cather's Southwest -- 13. Re(con)ceiving Experience: Cognitive Science and Creativity in The Song of the Lark -- 14. Women and Vessels in The Song of the Lark and Shadows on the Rock -- Epilogue: The Difference That Letters Make: A Meditation on The Selected Letters of Willa Cather -- Contributors -- Index

A haunting tribute to the heroic pioneers who shaped the American Midwest This powerful novel by Willa Cather is considered to be one of her finest works and placed Cather in the forefront of women novelists. It tells the stories of several immigrant families who start new lives in America in rural Nebraska. This powerful tribute to the quiet heroism of those whose struggles and triumphs shaped the American Midwest highlights the role of women pioneers, in particular. Written in the style of a memoir penned by Antonia’s tutor and friend, the book depicts one of the most memorable heroines in American literature, the spirited eldest daughter of a Czech immigrant family, whose calm, quite strength and robust spirit helped her survive the hardships and loneliness of life on the Nebraska prairie. The two form an enduring bond and through his chronicle, we watch Antonia shape the land while dealing with poverty, treachery, and tragedy. “No romantic novel ever written in America...is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.” -H. L. Mencken Willa Cather (1873–1947) was an American writer best known for her novels of the Plains and for One of Ours, a novel set in World War I, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943 and received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1944, an award given once a decade for an author's total accomplishments. By the time of her death she had written twelve novels, five books of short stories, and a collection of poetry.

Set in the 1850s, this short novel is about the struggles and triumphs of a bishop, Jean Marie Latour, and his loyal friend and vicar, Father Joseph Vaillant. They have been sent to reawaken and spread the Roman Catholic faith in an area where it has grown weak: New Mexico, recently annexed by the United States. Desolate and remote, the territory is home to many diverse groups: Mexicans, including those on ranches established for hundreds of years; Indians, who have been there much longer and who are divided by language and customs into thirty nations; and newcomers—hunters, fur trappers, and those seeking gold. This book is as much their story as it is the story of the priests and the vast changes the land itself underwent in those years. Death Comes for the Archbishop was a departure for Willa Cather, who had already published eight novels before publishing this one in 1927. The novel doesn’t try to follow a single unified story the way many historical novels do; instead, its nine chapters are episodic, filled with stories, legends, histories, and descriptions of the Southwest, which Cather had been visiting for many years before she started writing it. Many of its main characters, including the bishop and his vicar, are thinly disguised versions of real-life historical figures, while other famous New Mexicans of the day, including the frontiersman Kit Carson and the “powerful old priest,” Antonio José Martínez, appear under their actual names.