Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism

Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism PDF Author: Joan Ross Acocella
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803210462
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Defending Willa Cather against historical and critical distortions, the author argues that Cather's central vision was a tragic vision of the human condition rather than a firm political agenda.

Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism

Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism PDF Author: Joan Ross Acocella
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803210462
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Defending Willa Cather against historical and critical distortions, the author argues that Cather's central vision was a tragic vision of the human condition rather than a firm political agenda.

The Imaginative Claims of the Artist in Willa Cather's Fiction

The Imaginative Claims of the Artist in Willa Cather's Fiction PDF Author: Demaree C. Peck
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
ISBN: 9780945636878
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
In this, her first book, scholar Demaree C. Peck assigns Willa Cather her rightful place in our literary history. Challenging the assumption that women writers must draw their inspiration from a lineage of female predecessors, Peck portrays Willa Cather as a woman who self-consciously set out to write within a male literary tradition that she identified as Emersonian. Peck explores the psychological underpinnings of Cather's aesthetics to show that her theory of stylistic economy and simplicity was motivated by a desire to reorganize the elements of the artistic stage exclusively around her own romantic ego - that "inexplicable presence of the thing not named". Although Cather's protagonists appear in various disguises, clad as pioneers, lawyers, or priests, they are all incarnations of the artist who appropriates people and places as parts of consciousness. Cather's imaginative claimants seek to assimilate the world as a reflection of the self, in the way that their prototype, Emerson's poet-landlord, enjoys a figurative ownership of the landscape in reward for his integrating vision. The novels offer a series of ingenious masquerades beneath whose plots lurk variations of a single story impelled by the artist's quest to take imaginative possession of the world in order to recover the dominion of her soul. Unlike critics who have discussed Cather's novels as a series of discrete experiments, Peck charts the pursuit for imaginative possession as a continuous theme, thereby suggesting a coherence for Cather's art and career as a whole. Offering original interpretations of eight of Cather's novels in the light of previously undiscussed letters and other biographical materials, Peckexplores the relation between Cather's life and art to suggest that she created her central characters as surrogates whose imaginative accumulations could compensate her for various dispossessing experiences in her own life. Cather's novels operate according to the psychological laws of wish fulfillment. While Cather's romanticism has its historical origin in American transcendentalism, its psychological origin derives from the mythic domain of childhood. Cather's "kingdom of art" sanctions the dream projected upon childhood of an original omnipotence that could cheat fate and remain unsoiled by experience. Her novels enact a fantasy of return to primal wholeness. Peck suggests that the novels serve a restorative function not only for their author, but for Cather's readers as well. Cather's fiction is significant, Peck argues, because it performs an important psychological work for its audience.

Willa Cather

Willa Cather PDF Author: Janis P. Stout
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813933603
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Previous biographies of Willa Cather have either recycled the traditional view of a writer detached from social issues whose work supported a wholesome view of a vanished America, or they have focused solely on revelations about her private life. Challenging these narrow interpretations, Janis P. Stout presents a Cather whose life and quietly modernist work fully reflected the artistic and cultural tensions of her day. A product of the South--she was born in Virginia--Cather went west with her family at an early age, a participant in the aspirations of Manifest Destiny. Known for her celebrations of immigrants on the prairie, she in fact shared many of the ethnic suspicions of her contemporaries. Loved by a popular audience for her pieties of family and religion, she was in her youth a freethinker who resisted traditional patterns for women's lives, cutting her hair like a boy's and dressing in men's clothing. Seen by critics since the 1930s as a practitioner of an escapist formalism, she was, in Stout's view, profoundly ambivalent about most of the important questions she faced. Cather structured her writing to control her uncertainty and project a serenity she did not in fact feel. Cather has at times been viewed as a writer preoccupied with the past whose literary project had little to do with the intellectual currents of her time. On the contrary, Stout argues, Cather was a full participant in the doubts and conflicts of twentieth-century modernity. Only in recoil from her distress at these conflicts did she turn to overt celebrations of the past and construct a retiring, crotchety persona. The Cather that emerges from Stout's treatment is a modernist conservative in the mold of T. S. Eliot, though more responsive to her time and simultaneously less assured in her pronouncements. Cather's sexuality, too, is more complicated in Stout's version than previous biographers have allowed. Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World presents a woman and an artist who fully exemplifies the ambivalence, the foreboding, and above all the complexity that we associate with the twentieth-century mind.

One of Ours

One of Ours PDF Author: Willa Cather
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1442934379
Category : Farm life
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description


The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893-1896

The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893-1896 PDF Author: Willa Cather
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803200128
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
'The Kingdom of Art' attempts to give a summary of the first, elementary principles on which one writer based her art, and then to present a collection of critical statements--personal and occasional as well as theoretical--that seem to give a realistic view of Willa Cather as she was in the years 1893-1896.

Willa Cather and Aestheticism

Willa Cather and Aestheticism PDF Author: Ann Moseley
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson
ISBN: 1611475120
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
In this collection of essays, contributors investigate the various connections between Willa Cather’s fiction and her aesthetic beliefs and practices. Including multiple perspectives and critical approaches—derived from the Aesthetic Movement, the visual arts, modernism, and the relationship between art and religion—this collection will increase our understanding of Cather’s aesthetic and lead to a better comprehension of her work and her life.

A Lost Lady

A Lost Lady PDF Author: Willa Cather
Publisher: E-Kitap Projesi & Cheapest Books
ISBN: 6057566092
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
A Lost Lady is a novel by American author Willa Cather, first published in 1923. It centers on Marian Forrester, her husband Captain Daniel Forrester, and their lives in the small western town of Sweet Water, along the Transcontinental Railroad. However, it is mostly told from the perspective of a young man named Niel Herbert, as he observes the decline of both Marian and the West itself, as it shifts from a place of pioneering spirit to one of corporate exploitation. Exploring themes of social class, money, and the march of progress, A Lost Lady was praised for its vivid use of symbolism and setting, and is considered to be a major influence on the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. It has been adapted to film twice, with a film adaptation being released in 1924, followed by a looser adaptation in 1934, starring Barbara Stanwyck. A Lost Lady begins in the small railroad town of Sweet Water, on the undeveloped Western plains. The most prominent family in the town is the Forresters, and Marian Forrester is known for her hospitality and kindness. The railroad executives frequently stop by her house and enjoy the food and comfort she offers while there on business. A young boy, Niel Herbert, frequently plays on the Forrester estate with his friend. One day, an older boy named Ivy Peters arrives, and shoots a woodpecker out of a tree. He then blinds the bird and laughs as it flies around helplessly. Niel pities the bird and tries to climb the tree to put it out of its misery, but while climbing he slips, and breaks his arm in the fall, as well as knocking himself unconscious. Ivy takes him to the Forrester house where Marian looks after him. When Niel wakes up, he's amazed by the nice house and how sweet Marian smells. He doesn't't see her much after that, but several years later he and his uncle, Judge Pommeroy, are invited to the Forrester house for dinner. There he meets Ellinger, who he will later learn is Mrs. Forrester's lover, and Constance, a young girl his age.

Willa Cather and the Art of Conflict

Willa Cather and the Art of Conflict PDF Author: Patrick W. Shaw
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description


Paul's Case

Paul's Case PDF Author: Willa Cather
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 33

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Book Description
Paul is a schoolboy, described as tall and thin with strange eyes. He is facing the headmaster and several of his teachers, with whom he does not have a good relationship. All of them, in one way or another, find him difficult and disturbing to teach.

History, Memory and War

History, Memory and War PDF Author: Steven Trout
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803294646
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
A collection of essays that seeks to undo Willa Cather's longstanding reputation as a writer who remained aloof from the cultural issues of the day.