Cather Studies, Volume 10

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.

"A valuable contribution to Cather studies."—CHOICE, "Cather lovers in general, and especially those intrigued by Cather biography, will enjoy the ambitious plunge into the archive by many of these authors."—Kristen R. Egan, Western American Literature, "A major contribution to Cather scholarship."—Peter Betjemann, American Literary Realism

Anne L. Kaufman teaches mathematics at Milton Academy and is a visiting lecturer in English at Bridgewater State University. Her work has appeared in Western American Literature, Canadian Literature, Western Historical Quarterly, and elsewhere. Richard H. Millington is Helen and Laura Shedd Professor of English at Smith College. He is the author of essays on Cather’s modernism and of Practicing Romance: Narrative Form and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne’s Fiction, and he is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Norton Critical Edition of Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance.