Willa Cather and modern cultures
By: edited by Melissa J. Homestead and Guy J. Reynolds
Series: Cather studies -- 9; Cather studies -- 9.
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Lincoln
Language: eng
Number of pages: 306
ISBN-13: 9780803237728
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Willa Cather in and out of Zane Grey's West / John N. Swift; title: Thea's "Indian play" in The song of the lark / Sarah Clere; title: "Jazz age" places: modern regionalism in Willa Cather's The professor's house / Kelsey Squire; title: Changing trains: metaphors of transfer in Willa Cather / Mark A.R. Facknitz; title: Chicago's cliff dwellers and the song of the lark / Michelle E. Moore; title: Willa Cather and Henry Blake Fuller: more building blocks for The professor's house / Richard C. Harris; title: Cather's "Office wives" stories and modern women's work / Amber Harris Leichner; title: It's Mr. Reynolds who wishes it: profit and prestige shared by Cather and her literary agent / Matthew Lavin; title: Thea at the art institute / Julie Olin-Ammentorp; title: Art and the commercial object as ekphrastic subjects in The song of the lark and The professor's house / Diane Prenatt; title: "The nude had descended the staircase": Katherine Anne Porter looks at Willa Cather looking at modern art / Janis P. Stout; title: "The cruelty of physical things": picture writing and violence in Willa Cather's "The profile" / Joyce Kessler; title: "Before it's romanzas have become street music": Cather and Verdi's Falstaff, Chicago, 1895 / John H. Flannigan.