'The Kingdom of Art' attempts to give a summary of the first, elementary principles on which one writer based her art, and then to present a collection of critical statements--personal and occasional as well as theoretical--that seem to give a realistic view of Willa Cather as she was in the years 1893-1896.

In this, her first book, scholar Demaree C. Peck assigns Willa Cather her rightful place in our literary history. Challenging the assumption that women writers must draw their inspiration from a lineage of female predecessors, Peck portrays Willa Cather as a woman who self-consciously set out to write within a male literary tradition that she identified as Emersonian. Peck explores the psychological underpinnings of Cather's aesthetics to show that her theory of stylistic economy and simplicity was motivated by a desire to reorganize the elements of the artistic stage exclusively around her own romantic ego - that "inexplicable presence of the thing not named". Although Cather's protagonists appear in various disguises, clad as pioneers, lawyers, or priests, they are all incarnations of the artist who appropriates people and places as parts of consciousness. Cather's imaginative claimants seek to assimilate the world as a reflection of the self, in the way that their prototype, Emerson's poet-landlord, enjoys a figurative ownership of the landscape in reward for his integrating vision. The novels offer a series of ingenious masquerades beneath whose plots lurk variations of a single story impelled by the artist's quest to take imaginative possession of the world in order to recover the dominion of her soul. Unlike critics who have discussed Cather's novels as a series of discrete experiments, Peck charts the pursuit for imaginative possession as a continuous theme, thereby suggesting a coherence for Cather's art and career as a whole. Offering original interpretations of eight of Cather's novels in the light of previously undiscussed letters and other biographical materials, Peckexplores the relation between Cather's life and art to suggest that she created her central characters as surrogates whose imaginative accumulations could compensate her for various dispossessing experiences in her own life. Cather's novels operate according to the psychological laws of wish fulfillment. While Cather's romanticism has its historical origin in American transcendentalism, its psychological origin derives from the mythic domain of childhood. Cather's "kingdom of art" sanctions the dream projected upon childhood of an original omnipotence that could cheat fate and remain unsoiled by experience. Her novels enact a fantasy of return to primal wholeness. Peck suggests that the novels serve a restorative function not only for their author, but for Cather's readers as well. Cather's fiction is significant, Peck argues, because it performs an important psychological work for its audience.

"In a land where there is constant migration, can there be a "homeland"? In the United States, migration is initially experienced as immigration, but the process never achieves closure. Migration continues as transience - restless, unsettled movement across social and economic classes, states, and national borders. In this nuanced study grounded in literature, history, and popular culture, Joseph Urgo demonstrates that American culture and our sense of national identity are permeated by unrelenting, incessant, and psychic mobility across spatial, historical, and imaginative planes of existence." "There is no better example of a writer reflecting on this migratory consciousness than Willa Cather. At home in numerous locations - Nebraska, New York, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Maine, and Canada - Cather infused her novels with the cultural vitality that is a consequence of transience. By locating transience at the center of his conception of our national culture, Urgo redefines the mythos of American national identity and global empire. He concludes with an analysis of a potential "New World Order" in which migration replaces homeland as the foundation of world power."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Willa Cather's Modernism challenges the assumption that Cather was an old-fashioned exponent of styles of fiction, demonstrating instead that Cather was clearly aware of the experimentation within the modernist movement. Illustrative chapters deal with three central novels: A Lost Lady, The Professor's House, and My Mortal Enemy.

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.

Anna Pavlova's revolutionary debut in 1910 at the Metropolitan Opera House captivated the nation and introduced Americans to the charms of modern ballet. Willa Cather was among the first intellectuals to recognize that dance had suddenly been elevated into a new art form, and she quickly trained herself to become one of the leading balletomanes of her era. Willa Cather and the Dance: "A Most Satisfying Elegance" traces the writer's dance education, starting with the ten-page explication she wrote in 1913 for McClure's magazine called "Training for the Ballet." Cather's interest was sustained through her entire canon as she utilized characters, scenes, and images from almost all of the important dance productions that played in New York.

Cather's artistic voice speaks for and through the landscapes she loved in life. As several critics have noted, Cather's mind works by opposition, furiously spinning doubles of character, experience, temperament, and place. Locating the scenes she imagines in particular places, she forces her readers to merge character and place in a way no other American writer has ever done. Willa Cather's fiction is also suffused with the notion of exile. Her characters, often banished from a native or authentic landscape, are restless pilgrims who long for home - a comforting space, a rest from the arduous journey. In order to manage the condition of exile, Cather's characters must transform secular spaces into sacred places. In these sacred places, existence suddenly makes sense: order is created from chaos, as the history of the earth and the history of the individual merge and are reconciled. Indeed, these sacred places, with an aura of resolution and rightness in their very air, bring peace.

This book presents interprative approaches to Willa Cather based on materials available in the Drew University Cather Collection. The scholars suggest the work left to do on Willa Cather, and the diverse directions in which scholars now must travel.

The wide-ranging essays collected in this volume of Cather Studies examine Willa Cather?s unique artistic relationship to the environment. Under the theoretical rubric of ecocriticism, these essays focus on Cather?s close observations of the natural world and how the environment proves, for most of these contributors, to be more than simply a setting for her characters. While it is certain that Cather?s novels and short stories are deeply grounded in place, literary critics are only now considering how place functions within her narratives and addressing environmental issues through her writing. ø These essays reintroduce us to a Cather who is profoundly identified with the places that shaped her and that she wrote about: Glen A. Love offers an interdisciplinary reading of The Professor?s House that is scientifically oriented; Joseph Urgo argues that My ?ntonia models a preservationist aesthetic in which landscape and memory are inextricably entangled; Thomas J. Lyon posits that Cather had a living sense of the biotic community and used nature as the standard of excellence for human endeavors; and Jan Goggans considers the ways that My ?ntonia shifts from nativism toward a ?flexible notion of place-based community.?