Cather Studies

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.

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.

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.

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

Over the five decades of her writing career Willa Cather responded to, and entered into dialogue with, shifts in the terrain of American life. These cultural encounters informed her work as much as the historical past in which much of her writing is based. Cather was a multifaceted cultural critic, immersing herself in the arts, broadly defined: theater and opera, art, narrative, craft production. Willa Cather and the Arts shows that Cather repeatedly engaged with multiple forms of art, and that even when writing about the past she was often addressing contemporary questions. The essays in this volume are informed by new modes of contextualization, including the increasingly popular view of Cather as a pivotal or transitional figure working between and across very different cultural periods and by the recent publication of Cather’s correspondence. The collection begins by exploring the ways Cather encountered and represented high and low cultures, including Cather’s use of “racialized vernacular” in Sapphira and the Slave Girl. The next set of essays demonstrates how historical research, often focusing on local features in Cather’s fiction, contributes to our understanding of American culture, from musicological sources to the cultural development of Pittsburgh. The final trio of essays highlights current Cather scholarship, including a food studies approach to O Pioneers! and an examination of Cather’s use of ancient philosophy in The Professor’s House. Together the essays reassess Cather’s lifelong encounter with, and interpretation and reimagining of, the arts.

Willa Cather was devoted to making art in the face of violence. Here, she emerges as a resource for survival in an age of terror, an artist who encourages her readers to feel at home in the nexus of creativity and terror, and to seek creative responses to the horror of human life.

A contextualizing overview of the polarized critical reception of Willa Cather, one of the pre-eminent US authors of the twentieth-century.

Edith Wharton and Willa Cather wrote many of the most enduring American novels from the first half of the twentieth century, including Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence, and Cather’s O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. Yet despite their perennial popularity and their status as major American novelists, Wharton (1862–1937) and Cather (1873–1947) have rarely been studied together. Indeed, critics and scholars seem to have conspired to keep them at a distance: Wharton is seen as “our literary aristocrat,” an author who chronicles the lives of the East Coast, Europe-bound elite, while Cather is considered a prairie populist who describes the lives of rugged western pioneers. These depictions, though partially valid, nonetheless rely on oversimplifications and neglect the striking and important ways the works of these two authors intersect. The first comparative study of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather in thirty years, this book combines biographical, historical, and literary analyses with a focus on place and aesthetics to reveal Wharton’s and Cather’s parallel experiences of dislocation, their relationship to each other as writers, and the profound similarities in their theories of fiction. Julie Olin-Ammentorp provides a new assessment of the affinities between Wharton and Cather by exploring the importance of literary and geographic place in their lives and works, including the role of New York City, the American West, France, and travel. In doing so she reveals the two authors’ shared concern about the culture of place and the place of culture in the United States.