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The essays offer compelling ways of seeing and situating Willa Cather’s texts—both unsettling and advancing Cather scholarship. Cather was born and spent her first nine years in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Here, as an observant daughter of a privileged white family, Cather first encountered differences and dislocations that remained lively, productive, and sometimes deeply troubling sites of tension and energy throughout her writing life. These essays range from examinations of how race shapes and misshapes Cather’s final novel,
Sapphira and the Slave Girl, to challenges to criticisms of her 1935 novel,
Lucy Gayheart.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Unsettling Cather
Ann Romines and Marilee Lindemann
1. Keepsakes and Treasures: Investigating Material Culture in
Sapphira and the Slave Girl Sarah Clere
2. Willa Cather’s “Black Liberation Theology” in
Sapphira and the Slave Girl Barry Hudek
3. Willa Cather’s State of the Union:
Sapphira and the Slave Girl Tracyann F. Williams
4. Back to Virginia: “Weevily Wheat,”
My Ántonia, and
Sapphira and the Slave Girl Steven B. Shively
5. “Keen Senses Do Not Make a Poet”: Cather’s Respectful Rebellion against Whitman in
O Pioneers! Hannah J. D. Wells
6. Americans’ Coming of Age: Willa Cather’s Female National Hero in
The Song of the Lark Molly Metherd
7. “As Dangerous as High Explosives,” or, The Sexual Lives of Hired Girls: Sex Radicalism in
My Ántonia Geneva M. Gano
8. Mapping and (Re)mapping the Nebraska Landscape in the Works of Willa Cather and Francis La Flesche
Lisbeth Strimple Fuisz
9. Willa Cather and Mari Sandoz: The Muse and the Story Catcher in the Capital City
Sallie Ketcham
10. “Blue Sky, Blue Eyes”: Unsettling Multilingualism in
My Ántonia Andrew Wu
11. Regionalism Démeublé: Reflective Nostalgia in Cather’s
Death Comes for the Archbishop Jace Gatzemeyer
12. The Neuroscience of Epiphany in
Lucy Gayheart Joshua Doležal
13. Unsettling Accompaniment: Disability as Critique of Aesthetic Power in Willa Cather’s
Lucy Gayheart Elizabeth Wells
Contributors
Index
About the author
Marilee Lindemann is an associate professor of English and executive director of College Park Scholars at the University of Maryland. She is the author of
Willa Cather: Queering America and editor of
The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather and editions of
Alexander’s Bridge and
O Pioneers!Ann Romines is professor emerita of English at George Washington University. She is the author of
The Home Plot: Women, Writing, and Domestic Ritual and many essays on Cather. Romines is also the editor of
Willa Cather’s Southern Connections: New Essays on Cather and the South and
At Willa Cather’s Tables and the historical editor of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of
Sapphira and the Slave Girl.
