Something Complete and Great

The Centennial Study of My Ántonia

Holly Blackford Humes

• Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781683931263
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: LGBT Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This volume situates My Ántonia as a novel that stands the test of time by including in its pages an extraordinarily wide range of historical, cultural, literary, psychological, thematic, perceptual, and stylistic issues. The volume provides an analysis and assessment of complexities in the novel as well as its reception and legacy. The essays as a whole situate the novel at the cusp of the modern period, marking in myriad ways the novel's transitional role between nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and culture. The first section "Translation" features writers that reflect on Cather's curious devaluation of My Ántonia's reception over time; translation issues in Germany, Italty, France, and Russia; and linguistic issues in the novel's vision of Ántonia's acculturation. The second section "Tradition" defines Cather's relationship to modernism and regionalism through her career shifts and changes to the Introduction as well as her narrative technique in marginalizing violence and darkness to the edges of Jim's consicousness. The third section "Transgender" analyzes Cather's relationship to Hamlin Garland's Life on the Prairie, J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan and the Neverland, and the work of Truman Capote, especially his gay protagoanist Joel Knox in Other Voices, Other Rooms. The fourth section "Transhuman" deploys work on hysteria to situate Cather's vision of genderless desire and ecocritical lenses to understand Jim and nature. Finally the last section "Transition" discusses Lena Lingard's presence as a New Woman and gift economies in the novel that underscore the community's uneasy transition to twentieth-century capitalism. Gathered in the volume are an international group of scholars who demonstrate the novel's centrality to women's studies, American studies, queer studies, childhood studies, psychoanalysis, ecology, translation and reception, Marxism, narratology, and intertextuality.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Cather’s Sod House of Fiction
• Part I: Translation
• Chapter 1: What Willa Cather’s Letters Tell Us about the Reception of My Ántonia
• Chapter 2: “People in countries who read it in the strangest languages”
• Chapter 3: Ántonia’s Mother Tongue
• Part II: Tradition
• Chapter 4: “Live Property”
• Chapter 5: Violence in the Pastoral
• Part III: Transgender
• Chapter 6: Boyhood and the Frontier
• Chapter 7: The Nebraskan Neverland
• Chapter 8: “Obliterating Strangeness”
• Part IV: Transhuman
• Chapter 9: Hysterical Resistance
• Chapter 10: The Image of Nature in the Past in My Ántonia
• Chapter 11: My Ántonia
• Part V: Transition
• Chapter 12: A Portrait of a Self-Made Woman
• Chapter 13: The Gift Economies of My Ántonia
• Bibliography
• About the Contributors