The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather

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.

• A collection of newly commissioned essays by prominent critics of Cather • Illuminates her novels, the context in which she wrote, and her life • The most comprehensive guide to Cather available, invaluable for students of American literature, the novel, and gay literature

List of illustrators; Notes on contributors; Acknowledgements; Chronology of Willa Cather\'s life; Introduction Marilee Lindemann; Part I. Contexts and Critical Issues: 1. Willa Cather as progressive: politics and the writer Guy J. Reynolds; 2. The Cather thesis: the American empire of migration Joseph R. Urgo; 3. Willa Cather’s American modernism Richard H. Millington; 4. Willa Cather and the geography of Jewishness Lisa Marcus; 5. Willa Cather and sexuality Jonathan Goldberg; 6. Willa Cather and the performing arts Janis P. Stout; 7. Willa Cather and the comic sense of self Susan J. Rosowski; 8. Cather and the short story Mark J. Madigan; 9. Willa Cather in the country of the ill Sharon O’Brien; Part II. Studies of Major Works: 10. Rereading My Ántonia Anne E. Goldman; 11. Fictions of possession in The Professor’s House John N. Swift; 12. Catholic expansionism and the politics of depression in Death Comes for the Archbishop Leona Sevick; 13. Willa Cather and ‘the old story’: Sapphira and the Slave Girl Ann Romines; Selected bibliography; Index.

\'… should be in every library collecting materials on American literature and culture.\' Reference Reviews