Cather Studies, Volume 9

Willa Cather and Modern Cultures

Cather Studies, Guy J. Reynolds, Melissa J. Homestead

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780803237728
• eBook ISBN: 9780803239753
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Linking Willa Cather to "the modern" or "modernism" still seems an eccentric proposition to some people. Born in 1873, Cather felt tied to the past when she witnessed the emergence of twentieth-century modern culture, and the clean, classical sentences in her fiction contrast starkly with the radically experimental prose of prominent modernists. Nevertheless, her representations of place in the modern world reveal Cather as a writer able to imagine a startling range of different cultures.
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. From the interplay between modern and antimodern in her representations of native culture to the music and visual arts that animated her imagination, 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Willa Cather in and out of Zane Grey’s West
• 2. Thea’s “Indian Play” in The Song of the Lark
• 3. “Jazz Age” Places: Modern Regionalism in Willa Cather’sThe Professor’s House
• 4. Changing Trains: Metaphors of Transfer in Willa Cather
• 5. Chicago’s Cliff Dwellers andThe Song of the Lark
• 6. Willa Cather and Henry Blake FullerMore Building Blocks forThe Professor’s House
• 7. Cather’s “Office Wives” Stories and Modern Women’s Work
• 8. It’s Mr. Reynolds Who Wishes It Profit and Prestige Shared by Catherand Her Literary Agent
• 9. Thea at the Art Institute
• 10. Art and the Commercial Object as Ekphrastic Subjects in The Song of the Lark and The Professor’s House
• 11. “ The Nude Had Descended the Staircase”Katherine Anne Porter Looks atWilla Cather Looking at Modern Art
• 12. “The Cruelty of Physical Things”Picture Writing and Violence inWilla Cather’s “The Profile”
• 13. “Before Its RomanzasHave Become Street Music”Cather and Verdi’s Falstaff, Chicago, 1895
• Contributors
• Index