Willa Cather's Transforming Vision

Willa Cather's Transforming Vision PDF Author: Gary Brienzo
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
ISBN: 9780945636663
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
Willa Cather's Transforming Vision: New France and the American Northeast explores Cather's search for meaning and a domestic center, in particular as her search was influenced by her feelings for New France and the American Northeast. Including biography, critical overview, and primary research into both Cather's writing and some of her most unusual historical sources, this study focuses on Shadows on the Rock, while incorporating this pivotal novel into the larger pattern of Cather's growing need for belonging and order. Shadows on the Rock, set in the city of Quebec ("Kebec") at the end of the seventeenth century, is Cather's fullest expression of love for French culture and its adaptation to New World soil. But more than a mere extolling of what Mme. Auclair in Shadows proudly calls "our way" - a skill with all things domestic that, she boasts, renders the French "the most civilized people in Europe" - this novel is a statement of faith in the ability of both individuals and larger societal orders to work together for the creation of an all-encompassing whole. Writing at mid-life, after the recent illnesses and deaths of her parents, Cather could posit in her story of New France a familial order much larger than the domestic heart of her earlier masterpiece, My Antonia. In all of Quebec, as in the incomplete but fruitful home of the widowed apothecary Euclide Auclair and his daughter Cecile, life is sustained by a merging of gender and social roles, as a bishop can become the symbolic head of an entire church as well as of a troubled family, and a bellicose count can play as warm and nurturing a role as the gentlest of parents.

Willa Cather's Transforming Vision

Willa Cather's Transforming Vision PDF Author: Gary Brienzo
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
ISBN: 9780945636663
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
Willa Cather's Transforming Vision: New France and the American Northeast explores Cather's search for meaning and a domestic center, in particular as her search was influenced by her feelings for New France and the American Northeast. Including biography, critical overview, and primary research into both Cather's writing and some of her most unusual historical sources, this study focuses on Shadows on the Rock, while incorporating this pivotal novel into the larger pattern of Cather's growing need for belonging and order. Shadows on the Rock, set in the city of Quebec ("Kebec") at the end of the seventeenth century, is Cather's fullest expression of love for French culture and its adaptation to New World soil. But more than a mere extolling of what Mme. Auclair in Shadows proudly calls "our way" - a skill with all things domestic that, she boasts, renders the French "the most civilized people in Europe" - this novel is a statement of faith in the ability of both individuals and larger societal orders to work together for the creation of an all-encompassing whole. Writing at mid-life, after the recent illnesses and deaths of her parents, Cather could posit in her story of New France a familial order much larger than the domestic heart of her earlier masterpiece, My Antonia. In all of Quebec, as in the incomplete but fruitful home of the widowed apothecary Euclide Auclair and his daughter Cecile, life is sustained by a merging of gender and social roles, as a bishop can become the symbolic head of an entire church as well as of a troubled family, and a bellicose count can play as warm and nurturing a role as the gentlest of parents.

Willa Cather's Canadian and Old World Connections

Willa Cather's Canadian and Old World Connections PDF Author: Robert Thacker
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803263987
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Cather Studies 4 contains eighteen essays and elaborates a theme, ?Willa Cather?s Canadian and Old World Connections.? Such connections are central to Cather?s art and artistry. She transported much from the Old World to the New, shaping her antecedents to tell, in new ways, the stories of Nebraska, of the American Southwest, and especially of Quebec, in Shadows on the Rock. ø David Stouck details Cather?s numerous Canadian connections, Richard Millington treats her ?anthropological? re-creation of the cultural moment of seventeenth-century Quebec, and Franöois Palleau-Papin finds ?The Hidden French in Cather?s English.? A volume of lively and informed criticism, Cather Studies 4 vividly demonstrates Cather?s artistry and her work?s deep connections to the present cultural and critical moment.

One of Ours

One of Ours PDF Author: Willa Cather
Publisher: e-artnow
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Claude Wheeler is a young man who was born after the American frontier has vanished. The son of a successful farmer and an intensely pious mother, Wheeler is guaranteed a comfortable livelihood. Nevertheless, Wheeler views himself as a victim of his father's success and his own inexplicable malaise.Thus, devoid of parental and spousal love, Wheeler finds a new purpose to his life in France, a faraway country that only existed for him in maps before the First World War. Will Wheeler ever succeed in his new goal? The novel is inspired from real-life events and also won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.

Prospects for the Study of American Literature

Prospects for the Study of American Literature PDF Author: Richard Kopley
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814746981
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
What can there possibly be left to say about . . .? This common litany, resonant both in and outside of academia, reflects a growing sense that the number of subjects and authors appropriate for literary study is rapidly becoming exhausted. Take heart, admonishes Richard Kopley in this dynamic new anthology--for this is decidedly not the case. While generations of literary study have unquestionably covered much ground in analyzing canonical writers, many aspects of even the most well-known authors--both their lives and their work-- remain underexamined. Among the authors discussed are T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry James, Willa Cather, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain.

Willa Cather and Aestheticism

Willa Cather and Aestheticism PDF Author: Sarah Cheney Watson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611475112
Category : History
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.

The Stuff of Our Forebears

The Stuff of Our Forebears PDF Author: Joyce McDonald
Publisher: University Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817359583
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Connecting Cather's work to the southern literary tradition and the South of her youth A diverse and experimental writer who lived most of her life in New York City, Willa Cather is best known for her depiction of pioneer life on the Nebraska plains. Despite Cather's association with Nebraska, however, the novelist's Virginia childhood and her southern family were deeply influential in shaping her literary imagination. Joyce McDonald shows evidence, for example, of Cather's southern sensibility in the class consciousness and aesthetic values of her characters and in their sense of place and desire for historical continuity, a sensibility also evident in her narrative technique of weaving stories within stories and in her use of folklore. For McDonald, however, what most links Cather and her work to the South and to the southern literary tradition is her use of pastoral modes. Beginning with an examination of Cather's Virginia childhood and the southern influences that continued to mold her during the Nebraska years, McDonald traces the effects of those influences in Cather's novels. The patterns that emerge reveal not only Cather's strong ideological connection to the pastoral but also the political position implicit in her choice of that particular mode. Further analysis of Cather's work reveals her preoccupation with hierarchical constructs and with the use and abuse of power and her interest in order, control, and possession. The Willa Cather who emerges from the pages of The Stuff of Our Forebears is not the Cather who claimed to eschew politics but a far more political novelist than has heretofore been perceived.

Transforming Vision

Transforming Vision PDF Author: Edward Hirsch
Publisher: Bulfinch Press
ISBN: 9780821221266
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
In this unique and lavishly illustrated gift book, famous writers, including John Updike, Wallace Stevens, Joyce Carol Oates, and Philip Levine, contribute poems and prose--most never before published--on artworks found in one of the country's preeminent museums. 70 illustrations, 63 in color.

Italian Music in Dakota

Italian Music in Dakota PDF Author: Andrea Mariani
Publisher: V&R Unipress
ISBN: 384700655X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
The intersection between literature and music is a major feature in Anglo-American cultural history. The present volume analyzes the transatlantic migration of European opera and its appropriation by some of the most important literary figures of the United States. The presence of opera in literary texts is always "operative" and results in artistic outputs possessing more articulated and tense vectors of meaning. The comparative method applied confirms the musical sensitivity of masters such as Poe, Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, Wharton, Cather, reveals the intriguing contradictions in the poetics of Emerson, Thoreau and James and vindicates the role of some minor figures who, through their involvement in the world of musical theater, contributed to the intercultural context.

Museum Mediations

Museum Mediations PDF Author: Barbara K. Fisher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135490473
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary study participates in the ongoing critical conversation about postwar American poetry and visual culture, while advancing that field into the arena of the museum. Turning to contemporary poems about the visual arts that foreground and interrogate a museum setting, the book demonstrates the particular importance of the museum as a cultural site that is both inspiration and provocation for poets. The study uniquely bridges the dual canon in contemporary poetry (and calls the lyric/avant-garde distinction into question) by analyzing museum-sponsored anthologies as well as poems by John Ashbery, Richard Howard, Kenneth Koch, Kathleen Fraser, Cole Swensen, Anne Carson, and others. Through these case studies of poets with diverse affiliations, the author shows that the boom in ekphrasis in the past 20 years is not only an aesthetic but a critical phenomenon, a way that poets have come to terms with the critical dilemmas of our moment. Highlighting the importance of poets' peripheral vision-awareness of the institutional conditions that frame encounters with art-the author contend that a museum visit becomes a forum for questioning oppositions that have preoccupied literary criticism for the past 50 years: homage and innovation, modernism and postmodernism, subjectivity and collectivity. The study shows that ekphrasis becomes a strategy for negotiating these impasses-a mode of political inquiry, a meditation on canonization, a venue for comic appraisal of institutionalization, and a means of site-specific feminist revision-in a vital synthesis of critique, perspicacity, and pleasure.

Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux

Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux PDF Author: Cather Studies
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496200667
Category : Modernism (Literature)
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Introduction: Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux -- Prologue: Gifts from the Museum: Catherian Epiphanies in Context -- Part 1. Beginnings -- 1. The Compatibility of Art and Religion for Willa Cather: From the Beginning -- 2. Thea in Wonderland: Willa Cather's Revision of the Alice Novels and the Gender Codes of the Western Frontier -- 3. Ántonia and Hiawatha: Spectacles of the Nation -- Part 2. Presences -- 4. Willa Cather, Howard Pyle, and "The Precious Message of Romance"--5. "Then a Great Man in American Art": Willa Cather's Frederic Remington -- 6. Willa Cather, Ernest L. Blumenschein, and "The Painting of Tomorrow"--7. From The Song of the Lark to Lucy Gayheart, and Die Walküre to Die Winterreise -- 8. The Trafficking of Mrs. Forrester: Prostitution and Willa Cather's A Lost Lady -- 9. The Outlandish Hands of Fred Demmler: Pittsburgh Prototypes in The Professor's House -- 10. Translating the Southwest: The 1940 French Edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop -- Part 3. Articulation: The Song of the Lark -- 11. Elements of Modernism in The Song of the Lark -- 12. "The Earliest Sources of Gladness": Reading the Deep Map of Cather's Southwest -- 13. Re(con)ceiving Experience: Cognitive Science and Creativity in The Song of the Lark -- 14. Women and Vessels in The Song of the Lark and Shadows on the Rock -- Epilogue: The Difference That Letters Make: A Meditation on The Selected Letters of Willa Cather -- Contributors -- Index