Cather Studies, Volume 7: Willa Cather as Cultural Icon

by Cather Studies, Guy J. Reynolds (Editor)

Overview

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 helped to orchestrate her own iconic status.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803260115
Publisher:	Nebraska Paperback
Publication date:	11/01/2007
Series:	Cather Studies , #7
Pages:	366
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Guy Reynolds is the director of the Cather Project at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the author of Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire and Twentieth-Century American Women’s Fiction.

Table of Contents

Editorial Policy

Introduction: Willa Cather as Icon

      Guy Reynolds

A Commentary on An Explanation of America

      Robert Pinsky

What Happens to Criticism When the Artist Becomes an Icon?

      Elsa Nettels

Advertising Cather during the Transition Years (1914-1922)

      Erika Hamilton

Willa Cather and Her Public in 1922

      Janis P. Stout

A Portrait of an Artist as a Cultural Icon: Edward Steichen, Vanity Fair, and Willa Cather

      Michael Schueth

Willa Cather and the Book-of-the-Month Club

      Mark J. Madigan

"Two or Three Human Stories": O Pioneers! and the Old Testament

      Jessica G. Rabin

Barbusse's L'enfer: A Source for "Coming, Aphrodite!" and "The Novel Démeublé"

      Richard C. Harris

Recollecting Emotion in Tranquility: Wordsworth and Byron in Cather's My Ántonia and Lucy Gayheart

      Jonathan D. Gross

"Have I Changed So Much?": Jim Burden, Intertextuality, and the Ending of My Ántonia

      Timothy C. Blackburn

Shadows on the Rock: Against Interpretation

      Richard H. Millington

Cather's Shadows: Solid Rock and Sacred Canopy

      John J. Murphy

Cather's Secular Humanism: Writing Anacoluthon and Shooting Out into the Eternities

      Joseph R. Urgo

Subsequent Reflections on Shadows on the Rock

      Richard H. Millington, John J. Murphy, and Joseph R. Urgo

Cather, Freudianism, and Freud

      John N. Swift

Cather's Medical Icon: Euclide Auclair, Healing Art, and the Cultivated Physician     

      Joshua Dolezal

The Dialectics of Seeing in Cather's Pittsburgh: "Double Birthday" and Urban Allegory

      Joseph C. Murphy

Antithetical Icons? Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and the First World War

      Steven Trout

Icons and Willa Cather

      Merrill Maguire Skaggs

"A Critic Who Was Worthy of Her": The Writing of Willa Cather: A Critical Biography

      Robert Thacker

Contributors

Index