Willa Cather And European Cultural Influences

These essays open up debates about a number of Cather's texts, and suggest her stature as an American author much influenced by European culture and European immigrant culture in the US.

Willa Cather's novels were neglected after her death, but a new generation of readers has greeted her work with enthusiasm. This feminist study, which draws extensively on Cather's unpublished letters, analyses how she overcame the difficulties which beset a woman writer in the mid-West during the early part of the century. It shows how her absorption in European culture influenced her perception of America and enabled her to produce some of the most compelling literature of modern times. Susie Thomas's highly readable account will be welcomed by all those studying Cather's work. Contents: Willa Cather 1873-1947; To Bayreuth and Back Again: R The Troll Garden, The Song of the Lark, One of Ours, Uncle Valentine; From Horse Opera to Homesteads: O Pioneers ; The Golden Girl of the West: My Antonia; Time's Fool and A Lost Lady; To Speak of the Woe That is in Marriage: The Professor's House; The Chemistry of Colour: Death Comes For the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock; Testimony: Obscure Destinies, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, The Old Beauty and Others

"The essays in Cather Studies, Volume 8 explore the many locales and cultures informing Willa Cather's fiction. A lifelong Francophile, Cather first visited France in 1902 and returned repeatedly throughout her life. Her visits to France influenced not only her writing but also her interpretation of other worlds; for example, while visiting the American Southwest in 1912, a region that informed her subsequent works, she first viewed that landscape through the prism of her memories of Provence. Cather's intellectual intercourse between the Old and the New World was a two-way street, moving both people and cultural mores between the two. But her worlds extended far beyond France, or even geographical locations. This new volume pairs Cather innovatively with additional influences---theological, aesthetic, even gastronomical---and examines her as tourist and traveler cautiously yet assiduoulsy exploring a diverse range of palces, ethnicities, and professions."--BOOK JACKET.

The American Southwest was arguably as formative a landscape for Willa Cather?s aesthetic vision as was her beloved Nebraska. Both landscapes elicited in her a sense of raw incompleteness. They seemed not so much finished places as things unassembled, more like countries ?still waiting to be made into [a] landscape.? Cather?s fascination with the Southwest led to its presence as a significant setting in three of her most ambitious novels: The Song of the Lark, The Professor?s House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. This volume focuses a sharp eye on how the landscape of the American Southwest served Cather creatively and the ways it shaped her research and productivity. No single scholarly methodology prevails in the essays gathered here, giving the volume rare depth and complexity.

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.

Considering Native American literature within a modernist framework, and comparing it with writers such as Woolf, Stein, T.S Eliot and Proust results in a valuable and enriching context for the selected texts.

For all the disciplined artifice of Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery, the essays in this collection show that panic plays a crucial role in their work, giving substance to Bishop's claim that an element of mortal panic and fear underlines all art. This collection provides original commentaries on the work of two poets widely regarded as amongst the most significant American poets of the second half of the twentieth century with essays by notable scholars from the United States and Britain known for their special interests in modern poetry including Joanne Feit Diehl, Mark Ford, Edward Larissy, Peter Nicholls, Peter Robinson, Thomas Travisano, Cheryl Walker and Geoff Ward.