Books by Cather Studies

Informed by new modes of contextualization, including the increasingly popular view of Willa 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 essays in this collection reassess Cather's lifelong encounter with, and interpretation and reimagining of, the arts.

Includes essays on Cather's response to the cultural pessimism of Oswald Spengler, her affinities to Alphonse Daudet, and aspects of her art in "My Antonia", "The Professor's House", and "Shadows on the Rock".

Discusses topics ranging from Cather's pictorial sources to her familiarity with Dante and Russian literature.

The wide-ranging essays collected in this volume of Cather Studies examine Willa Cather's unique artistic relationship to the environment. Under the theoretical rubric of ecocriticism, these essays focus on Cather's close observations of the natural world and how the environment proves to be more than simply a setting for her characters.

Examining the influence of French Canada and French culture on Willa Cather, this is a collection of essays.

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.

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.

Divided into two sections, the essays in Cather Studies, Volume 9 examine Willa Cather as an author with an innovative receptivity to modern cultures and a powerful affinity with the visual and musical arts. The essays are unified by an understanding of Cather as a writer of transition whose fiction meditates on the cultural movement from Victorianism into the twentieth century.

The essays in Cather Studies, Volume 8 explore the many locales and cultures informing Willa Cather's fiction. This new volume pairs Cather innovatively with additional influences - theological, aesthetic, even gastronomical - and examines her as tourist and traveller cautiously yet assiduously exploring a diverse range of places, ethnicities, and professions.

Explores Willa Cather's iconic status and its problems within popular and literary culture. This work states that 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.

Part of a body of scholarship that seeks to undo Willa Cather's longstanding reputation as a writer who remained aloof from the cultural issues of her day, this collection demonstrates that Cather found the subject of war both unavoidable, because of her position in history, and artistically irresistible.