Cather Studies, Volume 10

Willa Cather and the Nineteenth Century

Cather Studies, Richard H. Millington, Anne L Kaufman

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780803276598
• eBook ISBN: 9780803277243
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part 1. Contexts
• 1. Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the Historiography of Lesbian Sexuality
• 2. Cather’s Readers, Traditionalism, and Modern America
• 3. Time Out of Place
• 4. Contamination, Modernity, Health, and Art in Edith Wharton and Willa Cather
• 5. From Sentimentality to Sex
• 6. Daughter of a War Lost, Won, and Evaded
• 7. A [Slave] Girl’s Life in Virginia before the War
• Part 2. Precursors and Influences
• 8. Cather’s Jewett
• 9. Willa Cather and the Example of Henry James
• 10. Kindred Spirits
• 11. The Rise of Godfrey St. Peter
• 12. Echoes of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage in Willa Cather’s One of Ours
• 13. Thackeray’s Henry Esmond and The Virginians
• 14. “One Knows It Too Well to Know It Well”
• 15. Following the Lieder
• 16. Pompeii and the House of the Tragic Poet in A Lost Lady
• 17. Making It New
• Contributors
• Index
• About Anne L. Kaufman
• About Richard H. Millington