"Western writers," says Thomas J. Lyon in his epilogue to Updating the Literary West, "have grown up with the frontier myth but now find themselves in the early stages of creating a new western myth." The editors of the Literary History of the American West (TCU Press, 1987) hoped that the first volume would begin, not conclude, their exploration of the West's literary heritage. Out of this hope comes Updating the Literary West, a comprehensive reference anthology including essays by over one hundred scholars. A selected bibliography is included with each piece. In the ten years since publication of LHAW, western writing has developed a significantly larger presence in the national literary stream. A variety of cultural viewpoints have developed, along with new tactics for literary study. New authors have risen to prominence, and the range of subjects has changed and widened. Updating the Literary West looks at topics ranging from western classics to cowboys and Cadillacs and considers children's literature, ethnicity, environmental writing, gender issues and other topics in which change has been rapid since publication of LHAW. This volume again affirms the West's literary legitimacy--status hard earned by the Western Literary Association--and the lasting place of popular western writing as part of the growing and changing literary--and American--experience. An excellent reference for a wide range of readers and an invaluable resource for scholars and libraries. Selected list of contributors: James Maguire Fred Erisman Susan J. Rosowski Gerald Haslam Tom Pilkington A. Carl Bredahl Richard Slotkin John G. Cawelti Robert F. Gish Ann Ronald Mick McAllister

From the girl in Red Cloud who oversaw the construction of a miniature town called Sandy Point in her backyard, to the New Woman on a bicycle, celebrating art and castigating political abuse in Lincoln newspapers, to the aspiring novelist in New York City, committed to creation and career, Daryl W. Palmer’s groundbreaking literary biography offers a provocative new look at Willa Cather’s evolution as a writer. Willa Cather has long been admired for O Pioneers! (1913), Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918)—the “prairie novels” about the lives of early Nebraska pioneers that launched her career. Thanks in part to these masterpieces, she is often viewed as a representative of pioneer life on the Great Plains, a controversial innovator in American modernism, and a compelling figure in the literary history of LGBTQ America. A century later, scholars acknowledge Cather’s place in the canon of American literature and continue to explore her relationship with the West. Drawing on original archival research and paying unprecedented attention to Cather’s early short stories, Palmer demonstrates that the relationship with Nebraska in the years leading up to O Pioneers! is more dynamic than critics and scholars thought. Readers will encounter a surprisingly bold young author whose youth in Nebraska served as a kind of laboratory for her future writing career. Becoming Willa Cather changes the way we think about Cather, a brilliant and ambitious author who embraced experimentation in life and art, intent on reimagining the American West.

A contextualizing overview of the polarized critical reception of Willa Cather, one of the pre-eminent US authors of the twentieth-century.

Willa Cather's close friend and travelling campanion presents a portrait of the well-known author, describing her personality, appearance, relationships, and response to life's hardships and triumphs.

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.

"The essays in Cather Studies, Volume 8 explore the many locales and cultures informing Willa Cather's fiction. A lifelong Francophile, Cather first visited France in 1902 and returned repeatedly throughout her life. Her visits to France influenced not only her writing but also her interpretation of other worlds; for example, while visiting the American Southwest in 1912, a region that informed her subsequent works, she first viewed that landscape through the prism of her memories of Provence. Cather's intellectual intercourse between the Old and the New World was a two-way street, moving both people and cultural mores between the two. But her worlds extended far beyond France, or even geographical locations. This new volume pairs Cather innovatively with additional influences---theological, aesthetic, even gastronomical---and examines her as tourist and traveler cautiously yet assiduoulsy exploring a diverse range of palces, ethnicities, and professions."--BOOK JACKET.

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.

Volume 7 of the Cather Studies series explores Willa Cather’s iconic status and its problems within popular and literary culture. Not only are Cather’s own life and work subject to enshrinement, but as a writer, she herself often returned to the motifs of canonization and to the complex relationship between the onlooker and the idealized object. Through textual study of her published novels and her behind-the-scenes campaign and publicity writing in service of her novels, the reader comes to understand the extent to which, despite her legendary claims and commitment to privacy, Willa Cather helped to orchestrate her own iconic status.