Willa Cather

Attached are a Table of Contents and a downloadable link for The VOICE of the CHILD in American Literature, written by MARY JANE HURST and published by the University of Kentucky Press in 1990.  The first book-length study of the child figure in American fiction, The Voice of the Child was a finalist for the Children’s Literature Association’s annual book award.

This paper analyzes Willa Cather's novel My 'Antonia, 1918 to refute the views which depict women as marginalized, stereotyped, and alienated and how these images start to change with the beginning of the twentieth century. It also examines how the novel's characters illustrate and demonstrate feminist values of the early 20 th century, known also as the first wave feminism, and how valid is Cather's paradigm in the contemporary time. It also emphasizes the idea that gender roles in society are more important than the sexes.

"In 1931, the Modern Library series reprinted Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and sold it for only 95 cents. For Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, the young owners of the Modern Library, this was a victory after years of unsuccessful attempts to include Cather titles in their series. However, Death Comes for the Archbishop stayed only five years in the Modern Library. At the insistence of Cather, the original publisher, Alfred Knopf, refused to renew the contract and Cerf and Klopfer had to drop the novel from their list.

While the literary scholar Sharon O’Brien has argued that “Willa Cather possessed canonical status during the 1920s only to lose it in the 1930s,” I contend that Cather became truly canonical in the early 1930s – when cheap series of reprints such as the Modern Library and Houghton Mifflin’s Riverside Library started marketing her works to a large audience of students and their professors. At the time when the canon of American literature was being created, many university instructors selected the cheap editions of Cather titles for classroom use. Cather's opposition to such dissemination of her fiction had long-term consequences: at the time when she was increasingly attacked by a new generation of Marxist critics, Cather made little effort to reach the academics who continued to admire her work. She failed to realize that she was competing with other American writers whose novels were easily available in the Modern Library and other cheap editions. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, it became obvious that Willa Cather had priced herself out of the canon. Despite Bennett Cerf’s efforts, the Modern Library did not include any title by Cather in the post-war years, a period of unprecedented growth for the series. Cather’s withdrawal from a series marketed as “the world’s best books” undoubtedly contributed to her loss of canonical status after the Second World War."

Antonette Willa Skupa Turner has been sharing the story of her famous grandmother—the prototype for Willa Cather's My Ántonia—for decades. Daryl Palmer and Tracy Sanford Tucker spent four days with the 97-year-old to learn what inspires her and why her grandmother's legacy is as important as ever.

Virginia Woolf set off a storm when she borrowed Coleridge's expression "a great mind is androgynous," and used it as a model for writers of both sexes. Woolf says, "He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided" (98). We will see how gender roles have been represented in a selection of stories from The Best American Short Stories of the Century. How have these stories embraced Woolf's idea of the "androgynous" mind, and how have they served as a commentary on society? How has the short story served as a tool to integrate this idea? We will see a trend develop over the course of the century in which the most positive male/female representations are the ones that embrace Woolf's "androgynous motif" as a model for behavior, and correspondingly, the ones who represent gender separation are presented as barbaric, anachronistic, and destructive. In "A Jury of Her Peers" (1917), we find that the traditional male/female relationship is being called into question because "female knowledge" has been left out of the equation of the Ro chester

But Now I See: Christian Science and American Literary History will be the first book to examine the connections between Christian Science and the American literary canon in all of their rich historical complexity, drawing on newly available primary material from the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston. Founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1866, the Church of Christ, Scientist was one of the fastest growing and most controversial religious movements in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Due to their adherence to a form of idealism that deemed the body and its symptoms unreal and the mere projections of mental states, Christian Scientists eschewed modern medical treatment, ran afoul of the professional medical establishment, and were the targets of journalists and other public figures who saw it as a threat to modern society. But because of its ability to blend biblical Christianity with transcendental romanticism and the rhetoric of modern science, this movement also achieved a certain level of intellectual respectability and exerted a demonstrable but underappreciated impact on U.S. culture and literature.

The book examines that impact through the narratives that were produced around Christian Science, focusing particularly on the lives and work of Frances Hodgson Burnett, Mark Twain and Theodore Dreiser along with the writers who participated in the early-twentieth-century “muckraking” of Christian Science, including Upton Sinclair and Willa Cather. My contention is that literary history is a particularly useful lens through which to examine the cultural impact of Christian Science because of the centrality of narrative to the movement’s appeals to potential converts. At the center of Christian Science and all of the talk that surrounds it are stories of sickness and healing. These “restitution narratives,” as Arthur Frank calls them, had social as well as individual implications, as stories about physical healing were so often linked to broader narratives of human progress. It is the argument of this book that the stories produced in and around the Christian Science movement – whether critical or supportive – were engaged in offering restitution for a society deeply in need of healing. At the heart of this controversy was not a battle between religious traditionalism and modernity (as the religion vs. science debate is so often framed) but rather a struggle over modernity’s master narratives of progress.

Julie Williams is a PhD candidate in the English department at the University of New Mexico. She is specializing in 19th and 20th century American literature, with a focus on landscape, popular culture, and unraveling the complexities of interactions between the many different cultures who reside in the American West. She received a B.A. from the University of Montana and a M.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is happy to round out her academic experience in the Southwest.

The shadow of death looms large over the fictional universe of Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather1 (1873-1947). As a result, the graveyard, the most concrete emblem of death, becomes the most expressive motif in the American writer's narratives. The graveyard is used by Cather both literally and metaphorically to describe the landscape and the characters she presents in her oeuvre. In fact, the graveyard is a constant presence in her corpus even when it is not explicitly named. Defying mortal times, a graveyard is an attempt to preserve memory, an attempt to idealize the essence of a deceased individual by the survivors. The urge to memorialise the departed is a universal one, transcending time and place. This urge was a predominant one in Cather's time. As Andrea Gabor explains, in the post-Civil War period: America overcame its democratic ambivalence to public sculpture[….]In the aftermath of the war, scores of towns and cities throughout the North, enjoying the fruits of victory and prosperity, rushed to erect sculptures that would commemorate their local heroes (Gabor 1997, 100).

Table of Contents and front matter of my book The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat (Cambridge UP, 2018).
See the section "Papers" for a pdf of the introduction.

Link to publisher website:
http://www.cambridge.org/9781108418768

Link to video of book launch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyjQeSmAFmQ

The Poetics of Insecurity turns the emerging field of literary security studies upside down. Rather than tying the prevalence of security to a culture of fear, Johannes Voelz shows how American literary writers of the past two hundred years have mobilized insecurity to open unforeseen and uncharted horizons of possibility for individuals and collectives. In a series of close readings of works by Charles Brockden Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather, Flannery O'Connor, and Don DeLillo, Voelz brings to light a cultural imaginary in which conventional meanings of security and insecurity are frequently reversed, so that security begins to appear as deadening and insecurity as enlivening. Timely, broad-ranging, and incisive, Johannes Voelz's study intervenes in debates on American literature as well as in the interdisciplinary field of security studies. It fundamentally challenges our existing explanations for the pervasiveness of security in American cultural and political life.

Reviews & endorsements

'The Poetics of Insecurity is an impressive and accomplished work that analyzes a range of American narratives from the early Republic to our present moment to show how an interest in and exploration of 'security' has been central to American literature and culture. Voelz makes contributions to multiple fields, including not only American literature broadly construed, but also narrative theory; it also joins a growing body of work exploring the intersections of the literary with non-literary conceptions of security, and contributes to recent work focused on chance and/or accident in American literary history.' Steven Belletto, Lafayette College, Pennsylvania

'The strength of Voelz's readings lies in their attentiveness to the ambivalent affective dimensions of insecurity, the intermingling of fear and desire that accompanies the contemplation of an uncertain future.' Deborah Thurman, The Review of English Studies

Through application of the contemporary term transmasculinity and the more historical stone butch, the author questions the critical tendency to perceive American writer Willa Cather only as lesbian while ignoring or undertheorizing a transgender longing at play in her fiction, short stories, and letters. While biographical evidence must not be approached as simply coterminous with literary production, as literature often exceeds or resists such alignments, Cather's letters in particular suggest a strong identification with her male fictional alliances. Analysis of her letters alongside two of her most treasured, and disparaged, novels, One of Ours (1922) and The Professor's House (1925), conveys Cather's wish for an idealized masculinity, both for herself and for Western culture, that would survive two coeval historical processes and events: the closing of the American frontier and the First World War. Through what the author calls a stone butch "armature," she and her characters retained masculine dignity despite historical foreclosure of Cather's manly ideal, Winston Churchill's Great Man, who was for her the artistic and intellectual casualty of the period. Cather expressed the peculiar nostalgic longing present in stone butch, and in the explosion of new forms of transmasculinity in the present. This suggests that historical transgender styles don't disappear entirely, even as new categories emerge.

This essay explores the challenge to the chivalric myth of the aviator in Willa Cather’s One of Ours and William Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay. Revived during the First World War, this romantic myth cloaked the aviator in idealism and hid the actual body of the flyer in rhetoric. In this war of increasing mechanization, the air war was the last bastion of individual, man-to-man combat; as such, the chivalric myth captured the hearts of the public, painting the aviators as knights of the air and romanticizing both their kills and their deaths in legends of glory.  Cather and Faulkner, writing shortly after the war’s end, expose this construction by showing aviators who are themselves subsumed by this myth, surrendering to this rhetoric until they essentially disappear within it. The pilots these authors present are decidedly unromantic, with raucous lives, disfiguring injuries and ignoble deaths.  By putting these texts in conversation with each other, and with the discourse of aerial chivalry, this essay fills a gap in the study of war literature.  Moving beyond the study of soldiers and the ground war, I show how these novels publicly critique the discursive formation of the aviator.

A coursework submission from the second year of my English BA. A discussion of the importance of space in the American novel, focused on the close analysis of Willa Cather's 'The Professor's House'. I examine the relationship between the spatial and the temporal, open and closed spaces, gendered space,  and space as American textual identity.

The protagonist of Willa Cather’s Paul's Case has been interpreted in different ways, especially in terms of his homosexuality and PTSD. But this short story has not been analyzed according to childhood trauma theories. Applying the theories of such thinkers as Sandra Bloom, Leonard Shengold, and Susan L. Reviere, the foregoing study is intended to examine the protagonist's alienation and isolation in the light of his childhood trauma. The trauma of losing his mother, as Reviere avers, has disrupted his schemas, turning him into an inflexible, inadaptable character, stripped of a comprehensive understanding of the world and the ability to interpret reality. Applying Bloom's theory, this paper will analyze Paul's various odd actions and behavior, arguing that due to the lack of linguistic ability and verbal communication, the protagonist resorts to the only means of self-expression at his disposal, i.e. "acting". Due to the other characters' lack of unde...

This is the introduction (with notes, plus front matter) of my book The Poetics of Insecurity (Cambridge UP, 2018).
Marketing blurb:
The Poetics of Insecurity turns the emerging field of literary security studies upside down. Rather than tying the prevalence of security to a culture of fear, Johannes Voelz shows how American literary writers of the past two hundred years have mobilized insecurity to open unforeseen and uncharted horizons of possibility for individuals and collectives. In a series of close readings of works by Charles Brockden Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather, Flannery O'Connor, and Don DeLillo, Voelz brings to light a cultural imaginary in which conventional meanings of security and insecurity are frequently reversed, so that security begins to appear as deadening and insecurity as enlivening. Timely, broad-ranging, and incisive, Johannes Voelz's study intervenes in debates on American literature as well as in the interdisciplinary field of security studies. It fundamentally challenges our existing explanations for the pervasiveness of security in American cultural and political life.

The realist and naturalist traditions constitute the longest aesthetic era of American literature.  This course introduces significant texts from the Civil War to post-World War I.  It examines literary responses to issues of race and violence, labor and commercial life, gender and family relations, immigration, and US class structure.

In Shadows on the Rock, Willa Cather continues to depict female characters who challenge traditional stereotypes but she also rereads women’s history, making this novel a culmination of her exploration into the reframing of women’s lives, both past and present. Her writing deepens the understanding of female immigrant history, marginalized women, and the commodification of the female body, all within her rewriting of historical characters in a way that leads to a reinterpretation and new understanding of the past. Shadows on the Rock is a text that invites readers to rethink the women of our past and give old definitions and stereotypical readings new understanding.

In 1920, Willa Cather’s second collection of short stories included “Coming, Aphrodite!,” a story focusing on the relationship between painter Don Hedger and opera singer Eden Bower and their disagreements concerning the aesthetics of art. Cather, a so-called Francophile, made her first trip to Europe with Isabella McClung some eighteen years prior, to tour the English and French cultures and see artists she had for so long admired. It was during this journey that, “with all the fire and immediacy of the modern age, she first began to feel the admiration and love of French art [and] French form, which has set such an impress on her work," no doubt involving the great influence of the Aesthetic Movement, or the idea of l’art pour l’art that had so greatly penetrated European artists’ lives. Regarding the influence of France on Cather during her first visit to that country, Robert Thacker writes “Poised as she was . . . on the verge of her most mature and complex writing, Cather was about to reach the goal she had set for herself while she was still living in Nebraska. Like Eden Bower in ‘Coming, Aphrodite!’ who knew early ‘that she was to be Eden Bower,’ Willa Sibert Cather . . . was about to become Willa Cather, author indeed, in the midst of her own major phase” (Thacker 2006, 45). Indeed, Willa Cather was strongly affected by the beauty of the French art she viewed as demonstrated in the strong correlation between the artistic philosophies of France’s burgeoning artistic icon, Fernand Léger, and her own character, Don Hedger.

Il tour europeo di Willa Cather 1 , ci spiega nel suo saggio Mark Madigan 2 , ha compreso una prima fase di tre mesi trascorsa in Inghilterra e Francia nel 1902, ed una seconda di un mese in Italia nel 1908, momenti interessanti per la conoscenza dell'Europa del tempo e dei suoi interessi per l'antica Grecia e Roma, che hanno influito sulla sua attività letteraria; difatti le rovine dell'antica Paestum le hanno ispirato una poesia "Paestum" (manoscritto della biblioteca dell'Università del Nebraska) 3 . L'autrice intraprese il viaggio in Italia a 35 anni di età; aveva già pubblicato un volume di poesie ed un altro di brevi racconti ed era editrice presso il McClure's Magazin; aveva sempre desiderato visitare soprattutto Roma. Il 9 aprile era partita da N. Y. sul S.S. Carpathia insieme ad Isabelle McClung, che l'aveva in precedenza accompagnata nel suo viaggio del 1902 4 . La nave raggiunse Napoli il giorno 23. Le due viaggiatrici trascorsero i primi quattro giorni del loro Grand Tour nelle vicinanze di Napoli e sulla costa di Amalfi, che già ella aveva ammirato nei dipinti di Capri e Positano realizzati da Earl Brewster al 570 Park Avenue 5 , i successivi 26 giorni a Roma e i seguenti 16 giorni a Venezia; ma l'amica dové rientrare a Pittsburg dopo una settimana per la malattia del padre. Da Venezia Willa raggiunse il Lago di Como rimanendovi cinque giorni e trascorse gli ultimi tre giorni a Genova, donde ripartì il 23 luglio. Da Napoli ella spediva, affascinata, una cartolina che illustrava l'Hotel S. Lucia, con via Caracciolo, il Golfo e il Vesuvio. Ritornò nella città partenopea per alcuni giorni nel 1920 e poi, nell'agosto e settembre del 1935, visitò Cortina sulle Alpi e, di nuovo, Venezia. Il manoscritto su Paestum, è in gran parte avvolto nel mistero, precisa ancora Mark Madigan, da quando con le sue 46 pagine di colore grigio fu donato all'Università del Nebraska nel 2001 6 . Sebbene Paestum non sia menzionata nella corrispondenza di Cather, McClung nel suo "Album di ritagli" scrive che loro visitarono la località alla fine di aprile o all'inizio di maggio.

In her 1922 aesthetic manifesto, ‘The Novel Démeublé’, Cather argues
that meaning inheres not in what’s put on the page, but what’s left out.
The novel works by under-specification and by omission.
"Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there – that,
one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not
named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it. How wonderful
it would be if we could throw all the furniture out the window; and along
with it, all the meaningless reiterations concerning physical sensations, all
the tiresome old patters, and leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek
theatre, or as that house into which the glory of the Pentecost descended;
leave the scene bare for the play of emotions great and little."
Fiction’s spaces, though architectural, are meant to be filled by voices
from elsewhere. The novel, for Cather, is a physical substrate on which
individual readers can hang, must hang, a wide set of memories, dreams
or speculations. In her remarkable not-quite-kunstlerroman, The Song
of the Lark (1915), Willa Cather begins developing an account of the
novel’s capacity for such empty occupation. She does so by way of an
implicit claim that fiction is both a supplement and a superior successor
to the experience of listening to music.