Volume 7 of the Cather Studies series explores Willa Cather s iconic status and its problems within popular and literary culture. Not only are Cather s own life and work subject to enshrinement, but as a writer, she herself often returned to the motifs of canonization and to the complex relationship between the onlooker and the idealized object. Through textual study of her published novels and her behind-the-scenes campaign and publicity writing in service of her novels, the reader comes to understand the extent to which, despite her legendary claims and commitment to privacy, Willa Cather...

Cather Studies 4 contains eighteen essays and elaborates a theme, "Willa Cather's Canadian and Old World Connections." Such connections are central to Cather's art and artistry. She transported much from the Old World to the New, shaping her antecedents to tell, in new ways, the stories of Nebraska, of the American Southwest, and especially of Quebec, in Shadows on the Rock. David Stouck details Cather's numerous Canadian connections, Richard Millington treats her "anthropological" re-creation of the cultural moment of seventeenth-century Quebec, and Francois Palleau-Papin finds "The Hidden...

Volume 3 of Cather Studies demonstrates the range of topics and approaches in contemporary discussions of Willa Cather s work for the informed reader or the specialized student. In fourteen essays, critics and scholars examine Cather s Catholic Progressivism, her literary relations with William Faulkner, and her place in the multicultural canon of American literature."

The wide-ranging essays collected in this volume of Cather Studies examine Willa Cather's unique artistic relationship to the environment. Under the theoretical rubric of ecocriticism, these essays focus on Cather's close observations of the natural world and how the environment proves, for most of these contributors, to be more than simply a setting for her characters. While it is certain that Cather's novels and short stories are deeply grounded in place, literary critics are only now considering how place functions within her narratives and addressing environmental issues through her...

Cather Studies 6 is part of a growing body of scholarship that seeks to undo Willa Cather's longstanding reputation as a writer who remained aloof from the cultural issues of her day. This chronologically arranged collection demonstrates that Cather found the subject of war both unavoidable, because of her position in history, and artistically irresistible. The volume begins with an essay addressing the American Civil War as part of Cather's southern cultural inheritance and concludes with an account of the aging writer's participation in the Armed Services Editions Program of World War II....

The essays in Cather Studies, Volume 8 explore the many locales and cultures informing Willa Cather's fiction. A lifelong Francophile, Cather first visited France in 1902 and returned repeatedly throughout her life. Her visits to France influenced not only her writing but also her interpretation of other worlds: for example, while visiting the American Southwest in 1912, a region that informed her subsequent works, she first viewed that landscape through the prism of her memories of Provence. Cather's intellectual intercourse between the Old and the New World was a two-way street, moving both...