Though Cather (1837-1947) moved with her family to Nebraska when she was nine, her fiction throughout her life drew heavily from the people, places, and issues of her native Reconstruction South. Novice and veteran literature scholars from around the US examine such connections as racial language, sexual dynamics, and clothes and gender. The 17 essays were selected from a 1997 symposium in Frederick County, Virginia. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Willa Cather’s twelfth and final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, is her most intense fictional engagement with political and personal conflict. Set in Cather’s Virginia birthplace in 1856, the novel draws on family and local history and the escalating conflicts of the last years of slavery—conflicts in which Cather’s family members were deeply involved, both as slave owners and as opponents of slavery. Cather, at five years old, appears as a character in an unprecedented first-person epilogue. Tapping her earliest memories, Cather powerfully and sparely renders a Virginia world that is simultaneously beautiful and, as she said, “terrible.” The historical essay and explanatory notes explore the novel’s grounding in family, local, and national history; show how southern cultures continually shaped Cather’s life and work, culminating with this novel; and trace the progress of Cather’s research and composition during years of grief and loss that she described as the worst of her life. More early drafts, including manuscript fragments, are available for Sapphira and the Slave Girl than for any other Cather novel, and the revealing textual essay draws on this rich resource to provide new insights into Cather’s composition process.
The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather offers thirteen original essays by leading scholars of a major American modernist novelist. Willa Cather's luminous prose is 'easy' to read yet surprisingly difficult to understand. The essays collected here are theoretically informed but accessibly written and cover the full range of Cather's career, including most of her twelve novels and several of her short stories. The essays situate Cather's work in a broad range of critical, cultural, and literary contexts, and the introduction explores current trends in Cather scholarship as well as the author's place in contemporary culture. With a detailed chronology and a guide to further reading, the volume offers students and teachers a fresh and thorough sense of the author of My Ántonia, The Professor's House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop.
My Antonia is a novel by an American writer Willa Cather. It is the final book of the "prairie trilogy" of novels, preceded by O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. The novel tells the stories of an orphaned boy from Virginia, Jim Burden, and Antonia Shimerda, the daughter of Bohemian immigrants. They are both became pioneers and settled in Nebraska in the end of the 19th century. The first year in the very new place leaves strong impressions in both children, affecting them lifelong. The narrator and the main character of the novel My Antonia, Jim grows up in Black Hawk, Nebraska from age 10 Eventually, he becomes a successful lawyer and moves to New York City.
Previous biographies of Willa Cather have either recycled the traditional view of a writer detached from social issues whose work supported a wholesome view of a vanished America, or they have focused solely on revelations about her private life. Challenging these narrow interpretations, Janis P. Stout presents a Cather whose life and quietly modernist work fully reflected the artistic and cultural tensions of her day. A product of the South--she was born in Virginia--Cather went west with her family at an early age, a participant in the aspirations of Manifest Destiny. Known for her celebrations of immigrants on the prairie, she in fact shared many of the ethnic suspicions of her contemporaries. Loved by a popular audience for her pieties of family and religion, she was in her youth a freethinker who resisted traditional patterns for women's lives, cutting her hair like a boy's and dressing in men's clothing. Seen by critics since the 1930s as a practitioner of an escapist formalism, she was, in Stout's view, profoundly ambivalent about most of the important questions she faced. Cather structured her writing to control her uncertainty and project a serenity she did not in fact feel. Cather has at times been viewed as a writer preoccupied with the past whose literary project had little to do with the intellectual currents of her time. On the contrary, Stout argues, Cather was a full participant in the doubts and conflicts of twentieth-century modernity. Only in recoil from her distress at these conflicts did she turn to overt celebrations of the past and construct a retiring, crotchety persona. The Cather that emerges from Stout's treatment is a modernist conservative in the mold of T. S. Eliot, though more responsive to her time and simultaneously less assured in her pronouncements. Cather's sexuality, too, is more complicated in Stout's version than previous biographers have allowed. Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World presents a woman and an artist who fully exemplifies the ambivalence, the foreboding, and above all the complexity that we associate with the twentieth-century mind.
Willa Cather s My Antonia, a nostalgic novel about an earlier America, portrays the harmonies and disharmonies of the human world and the world of nature. This new edition gathers together some of the best criticism available on the text.
