Stout identifies five basic, recurring patterns of the journey narrative: exploration and escape; homeseeking; return; heroic quest; and wandering. Discussion of these patterns is based on considerations such as the direction of the journey, its motivation, and reference to historical precedents. Stout considers works that demonstrate the complex and interwoven patterns of the journey narrative. The more complex the work, the more intricately interwoven these patterns are. To illustrate the all-inclusiveness of the journey motif in American literature Stout pursues the theme into the realm...
Stout identifies five basic, recurring patterns of the journey narrative: exploration and escape; homeseeking; return; heroic quest; and wandering....
An infamous clause in Willa Cather's will, forbidding publication of her letters and other papers, has long caused consternation among Cather scholars. For Cather, a complex and private person who seldom made revelatory public pronouncements, personal letters provide-or would provide-an especially valuable key to understanding. But because of the terms of her will, that key is not readily available. Cather's letters will not come into public domain until the year 2017. Until then, even quotation, let alone publication in full, is prohibited.
Janis P. Stout has gathered over eighteen...
An infamous clause in Willa Cather's will, forbidding publication of her letters and other papers, has long caused consternation among Cather scholars...
Previous biographies of Willa Cather have either recycled the traditional view of a writer detached from social issues whose work supported a wholesome view of a vanished America, or they have focused solely on revelations about her private life. Challenging these narrow interpretations, Janis P. Stout presents a Cather whose life and quietly modernist work fully reflected the artistic and cultural tensions of her day.
A product of the South--she was born in Virginia--Cather went west with her family at an early age, a participant in the aspirations of Manifest Destiny. Known for her...
Previous biographies of Willa Cather have either recycled the traditional view of a writer detached from social issues whose work supported a whole...
Picturing a Different West addresses Willa Cather and Mary Austin as central figures in a women s tradition of the pictured West. Both Cather and Austin moved west in their youth and spent much of their lives there. Cather lived on the Great Plains, while Austin resided in California and the Southwest. Cather s travels repeatedly took her to the Southwest, and she wrote three novels with Southwestern settings.Starting with the masculine tradition of Western art that was prevalent when Austin and Cather launched their careers, Janis P. Stout shows how the authors challenged and revised that...
Picturing a Different West addresses Willa Cather and Mary Austin as central figures in a women s tradition of the pictured West. Both Cather and Aust...
Memoirs are tricky, especially when the author isn't widely known. But Janis Stout tackles the memoir with a new and inventive approach-she organizes her memories around the houses she's lived in. "Sometimes," she wrote, "I picture my life as a long row of houses." Houses, she claims, are metaphors for the structures of our lives, and Stout's houses twine their way through this memoir along with reflections on work and retirement, marriages good and bad, and quietness for engaging in the important last work of life. She is, she says, a little different in each house-but each house shaped who...
Memoirs are tricky, especially when the author isn't widely known. But Janis Stout tackles the memoir with a new and inventive approach-she organizes ...
A compilation of essays focusing on the significance of material culture to Cather s work and Cather scholarship.
Willa Cather and Material Culture is a collection of 11 new essays that tap into a recent and resurgent interest among Cather scholars in addressing her work and her career through the lens of cultural studies. One of the volume's primary purposes is to demonstrate the extent to which Cather did participate in her culture and to correct the commonplace view of her as a literary connoisseur set apart from her times.
The contributors explore both the objects...
A compilation of essays focusing on the significance of material culture to Cather s work and Cather scholarship.
An interdisciplinary study of Katherine Anne Porter s troubled relationship to her Texas origins and southern roots, South by Southwest offers a fresh look at this ever-relevant author.
Today, more than thirty years after her death, Katherine Anne Porter remains a fascinating figure. Critics and biographers have portrayed her as a strikingly glamorous woman whose photographs appeared in society magazines. They have emphasized, of course, her writing particularly the novel Ship of Fools, which was made into an award-winning film, and her collection Pale Horse, Pale...
An interdisciplinary study of Katherine Anne Porter s troubled relationship to her Texas origins and southern roots, South by Southwest off...
World War I is widely considered the Great War and World War II, the Good War. Janis Stout thinks of them as two parts of a whole that continues to engage historians and literary scholars searching for an understanding of both the actual war experiences and the modern culture of grief they embody. In Coming Out of War: Poetry, Grieving, and the Culture of the World Wars Stout argues that poetry, of all the arts, most fully captures and conveys those cultural responses.
While probing the work of such well known war poets as Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Randall Jarrell,...
World War I is widely considered the Great War and World War II, the Good War. Janis Stout thinks of them as two parts of a whole that continues to...
This volume situates My Antonia 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.
This volume situates My Antonia as a novel that stands the test of time by including in its pages an extraordinarily wide range of historical, cultura...
