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Willa Cather and the American Southwest

John N Swift author Joseph R Urgo editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Nebraska Press

Published:1st Jun '04

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Willa Cather and the American Southwest cover

Focuses on how the landscape of the American Southwest served the author creatively and the ways it shaped her research and productivity.The American Southwest was arguably as formative a landscape for Willa Cather’s aesthetic vision as was her beloved Nebraska. Both landscapes elicited in her a sense of raw incompleteness. They seemed not so much finished places as things unassembled, more like countries “still waiting to be made into [a] landscape.” Cather’s fascination with the Southwest led to its presence as a significant setting in three of her most ambitious novels: The Song of the Lark, The Professor’s House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. This volume focuses a sharp eye on how the landscape of the American Southwest served Cather creatively and the ways it shaped her research and productivity. No single scholarly methodology prevails in the essays gathered here, giving the volume rare depth and complexity.

“The essays in this engaging volume take on the wide geographical and cultural landscape of the two 1920s novels [The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop] . . . . German anthropology, New Mexican folk art, Anasazi cannibalism, the Smithsonian Museum, and ‘sentimental nationality’ are just a few of the areas explored by the intrepid contributors.”—Choice
"[The collection] is serious, scholarly, and commedably broad within the narrow confines of single-author studies."—Jennifer Jenkins, The Journal of Arizona History

ISBN: 9780803293168

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 272g

180 pages