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.
Military matters surface not only in One of Ours and The Professor’s House, Cather’s two major contributions to the literature of World War I, but in most of her other works as well, including My Ántonia, in which the Plains Indian Wars and the Spanish-American conflict of 1898 are subtly but significantly evoked, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Cather’s largely ironic contribution to the genre of southern “Lost Cause” fiction. Containing essays by leading Cather scholars, such as Ann Romines and Janis Stout, and work by specialists in war literature, whose inclusion expands the number and range of critical perspectives, this volume breaks new ground.
Papildus informācija
Seeks to undo Willa Cather's longstanding reputation as a writer who remained aloof from the cultural issues of the day.
| Editorial Policy |
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ix | |
| Introduction |
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xi | |
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| Willa Lather's Civil War: A Very Long Engagement |
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1 | (27) |
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| Jim Burden and the White Man's Burden: My Antonia and Empire |
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28 | (30) |
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| The Not-So-Great War: Lather Family Letters and the Spanish-American War |
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58 | (12) |
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| Between Two Wars in a Breaking World: Willa Lather and the Persistence of War Consciousness |
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70 | (22) |
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| The "Enid Problem": Dangerous Modernity in One of Ours |
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92 | (37) |
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| "Squeezed into an Unnatural Shape": Bayliss Wheeler and the Element of Control in One of Ours |
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129 | (16) |
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| "As Green as Their Money": The Doughboy Naffs in One of Ours |
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145 | (15) |
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| Recreation in World War I and the Practice of Play in One of Ours |
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160 | (24) |
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| Culture and the "Cathedral": Tourism as Potlatch in One of Ours |
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184 | (21) |
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| On the Front and at Home: Wharton, Cather, the Jews, and the First World War |
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205 | (23) |
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| Looking at Agony: World War I in The Professor's House |
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228 | (16) |
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| Cather's Literary Choreography: The "Glittering Idea" of Scientific Warfare in The Professor's House |
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244 | |
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| Rebuilding the Outland Engine: A New Source for The Professor's House |
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171 | (114) |
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| Wartime Fictions: Willa Cather, the Armed Services Editions, and the Unspeakable Second World War |
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285 | (12) |
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| Contributors |
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297 | (4) |
| Index |
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301 | |
Steven Trout is a professor of English at Fort Hays State University. He is the author of Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War (Nebraska 2002) and the coeditor of The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory. Contributors include Mary Chinery, Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Gorman, Jennifer Haytock, Pearl James, Celia M. Kingsbury, Susan Meyer, Margaret Anne O'Connor, Wendy K. Perriman, Mark A. Robison, Ann Romines, Mary R. Ryder, Janis P. Stout, and Steven Trout.
