The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather offers thirteen original essays by leading scholars of a major American modernist novelist. Willa Cather's luminous prose is 'easy' to read yet surprisingly difficult to understand. The essays collected here are theoretically informed but accessibly written and cover the full range of Cather's career, including most of her twelve novels and several of her short stories. The essays situate Cather's work in a broad range of critical, cultural, and literary contexts, and the introduction explores current trends in Cather scholarship as well as the author's place in contemporary culture. With a detailed chronology and a guide to further reading, the volume offers students and teachers a fresh and thorough sense of the author of My Ántonia, The Professor's House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop.

This Companion offers a comprehensive analysis of U.S. modernism as part of a global literature. Recent writing on U.S. immigration, imperialism, and territorial expansion has generated fresh reasons to read modernist novelists, both prominent and forgotten. Written by a host of leading scholars, this Companion provides unique approaches to modernist texts.

Willa Cather's elegiac tales of the pioneer experience on the American frontier continue to captivate new generations of readers. Written especially for students, this critical introduction offers insightful yet accessible criticism of Cather's most widely read novels. A full chapter examines each work, with full discussions of character development, thematic concerns, plot, critical reception, and historical contexts. Students will find this book a valuable guide to this great American author. The volume covers such enduring works as Alexander's Bridge, O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, My D'Antonia, The Professor's House, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Shadows on the Rock. Each chapter is devoted to an individual novel and provides a full discussion of character development, thematic concerns, and plot structure. The introduction to each novel traces its genesis and its critical reception at the time of publication. The historical context sections place Cather's vision of the pioneer spirit and achievement within the context of a rapidly changing America that was in the process of abandoning its traditional values and thus risking its source of greatness. Students will find this book a valuable guide to Cather's works.

Though both Willa Cather and E. M. Forster have been alternately praised as progressives and criticized as conservatives, the novels of both writers embody the tenets of liberal humanism, while at the same time reflecting the tensions associated with modernism (though both of these terms have come under intense critical scrutiny in recent years.) And while a few critics have offered brief comparisons of individual works or particular tendencies of Cather and Forster, none has provided the systematic comparative analysis of the relationship between liberal humanist/modernist tensions and the search for transcendence in their work that this book offers. The principal aims of the present study are to locate the imagined alternatives to the "lamentable present" embodied in the novels of both writers and to explore how literature and the arts might assist in transcending the deficiencies and disunities of life in the modern era.

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.

An introduction to how the history of Rome was written in the ancient world, and its impact on later periods. It presents essays by an international team of scholars that aim both to orient non-specialist readers to the important concerns of the Roman historians and also to stimulate new research.

Satire as a distinct genre of writing was first developed by the Romans in the second century BCE. Regarded by them as uniquely 'their own', satire held a special place in the Roman imagination as the one genre that could address the problems of city life from the perspective of a 'real Roman'. In this Cambridge Companion an international team of scholars provides a stimulating introduction to Roman satire's core practitioners and practices, placing them within the contexts of Greco-Roman literary and political history. Besides addressing basic questions of authors, content, and form, the volume looks to the question of what satire 'does' within the world of Greco-Roman social exchanges, and goes on to treat the genre's further development, reception, and translation in Elizabethan England and beyond. Included are studies of the prosimetric, 'Menippean' satires that would become the models of Rabelais, Erasmus, More, and (narrative satire's crowning jewel) Swift.

"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.

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.