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.

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.

In this first full-length study of male homosexuality in Cather's short stories and novels, John P. Anders examines patterns of male friendship ranging on a continuum from the social to the sexual. He reveals how Cather's work assumes an unexpected depth and complexity by drawing on both the familiar tradition of friendship literature inspired by classical and Christian texts and a homosexual legacy that is part of, yet distinct from, established literary traditions. Anders argues that Cather's artistic achievement is distinguished by her sexual aesthetics, an elusive literary style inextricably associated with homosexuality. His analysis demonstrates how a homosexual ethos and eros helped Cather develop a sensitivity to human variation and a style to accommodate it and thus became the objective correlative of her art, dramatizing the diversity of human nature as it deepens the mystery of her work.

This comparative critical study of Willa Cather and Marguerite Duras reveals the blurring of fiction and autobiography in their works, focusing on their concerns for women, children and the socially marginalized. The study highlights issues of power and authority relevant to the study of feminism and women's writing during and after the world wars.

In this first full-length study of male homosexuality in Cather's short stories and novels, John P. Anders examines patterns of male friendship ranging on a continuum from the social to the sexual. He reveals how Cather's work assumes an unexpected depth and complexity by drawing on both the familiar tradition of friendship literature inspired by classical and Christian texts and a homosexual legacy that is part of, yet distinct from, established literary traditions. ø Anders argues that Cather's artistic achievement is distinguished by her sexual aesthetics, an elusive literary style inextricably associated with homosexuality. His analysis demonstrates how a homosexual ethos and eros helped Cather develop a sensitivity to human variation and a style to accommodate it and thus became the objective correlative of her art, dramatizing the diversity of human nature as it deepens the mystery of her work.

In this important new book from a distinguished scholar, Josephine Donovan develops a new aesthetics of care, which she establishes as the basis for a critical approach to the representation of animals in literature. The Aesthetics of Care begins with a guide to the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, leading to a reconceptualization of key literary critical terms such as mimesis and catharsis, before moving on to an applied section, with interpretations of the specific treatment of animals handled by a wide range of authors, including Willa Cather, Leo Tolstoy, George Sand, and J.M. Coetzee. The book closes with three concluding theoretical chapters. Clear, original, and provocative, The Aesthetics of Care introduces and makes new contributions to a number of burgeoning areas of study and debate: aesthetics and ethics, critical theory, animal ethics, and ecofeminist criticism.

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 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.

Willa Cather was devoted to making art in the face of violence. Here, she emerges as a resource for survival in an age of terror, an artist who encourages her readers to feel at home in the nexus of creativity and terror, and to seek creative responses to the horror of human life.

Edith Wharton and Willa Cather wrote many of the most enduring American novels from the first half of the twentieth century, including Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence, and Cather’s O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. Yet despite their perennial popularity and their status as major American novelists, Wharton (1862–1937) and Cather (1873–1947) have rarely been studied together. Indeed, critics and scholars seem to have conspired to keep them at a distance: Wharton is seen as “our literary aristocrat,” an author who chronicles the lives of the East Coast, Europe-bound elite, while Cather is considered a prairie populist who describes the lives of rugged western pioneers. These depictions, though partially valid, nonetheless rely on oversimplifications and neglect the striking and important ways the works of these two authors intersect. The first comparative study of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather in thirty years, this book combines biographical, historical, and literary analyses with a focus on place and aesthetics to reveal Wharton’s and Cather’s parallel experiences of dislocation, their relationship to each other as writers, and the profound similarities in their theories of fiction. Julie Olin-Ammentorp provides a new assessment of the affinities between Wharton and Cather by exploring the importance of literary and geographic place in their lives and works, including the role of New York City, the American West, France, and travel. In doing so she reveals the two authors’ shared concern about the culture of place and the place of culture in the United States.