This volume situates My Antonia as a novel that stands the test of time by including in its pages an extraordinarily wide range of historical, cultural, literary, psychological, thematic, perceptual, and stylistic issues. The volume provides an analysis and assessment of complexities in the novel as well as its reception and legacy. The essays as a whole situate the novel at the cusp of the modern period, marking in myriad ways the novel's transitional role between nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and culture. The first section "Translation" features writers that reflect on Cather's curious devaluation of My Antonia's reception over time; translation issues in Germany, Italty, France, and Russia; and linguistic issues in the novel's vision of Antonia's acculturation. The second section "Tradition" defines Cather's relationship to modernism and regionalism through her career shifts and changes to the Introduction as well as her narrative technique in marginalizing violence and darkness to the edges of Jim's consicousness. The third section "Transgender" analyzes Cather's relationship to Hamlin Garland's Life on the Prairie, J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan and the Neverland, and the work of Truman Capote, especially his gay protagoanist Joel Knox in Other Voices, Other Rooms. The fourth section "Transhuman" deploys work on hysteria to situate Cather's vision of genderless desire and ecocritical lenses to understand Jim and nature. Finally the last section "Transition" discusses Lena Lingard's presence as a New Woman and gift economies in the novel that underscore the community's uneasy transition to twentieth-century capitalism. Gathered in the volume are an international group of scholars who demonstrate the novel's centrality to women's studies, American studies, queer studies, childhood studies, psychoanalysis, ecology, translation and reception, Marxism, narratology, and intertextuality.

Caterina Bernardini gauges the effects that Walt Whitman's poetry had in Italy from 1870 to 1945: the reactions it provoked, the aesthetic and political agendas it came to sponsor, and the creative responses it facilitated. Particular attention is given to women writers and noncanonical writers often excluded from previous discussions in this area of study. Bernardini also investigates the contexts and causes of Whitman's success abroad through the lives, backgrounds, beliefs, and imaginations of the people who encountered his work. Studying Whitman's reception from a transnational perspective shows how many countries were simultaneously carving out a new modernity in literature and culture. In this sense, Bernardini not only shows the interconnectedness of various international agents in understanding and contributing to the spread of Whitman's work, but, more largely, illustrates a constellation of similar pre-modernist and modernist sensibilities. This stands in contrast to the notion of sudden innovation: modernity was not easy to achieve, and it did not imply a complete refusal of tradition. Instead, a continuous and fruitful negotiation between tradition and innovation, not a sudden break with the literary past, is at the very heart of the Italian and transnational reception of Whitman. The book is grounded in archival studies and the examination of primary documents of noteworthy discovery.

The volume situates My Ántonia as a novel that stands the test of time by including in its pages an extraordinarily wide range of historical, cultural, literary, psychological, thematic, perceptual, and stylistic issues. The volume provides an analysis and assessment of complexities in the novel as well as its reception and legacy. The essays as a whole situate the novel at the cusp of the modern period, marking in myriad ways the novel’s transitional role between nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and culture. The first section “Translation” features writers that reflect on Cather’s curious devaluation of My Ántonia’s reception over time; translation issues in Germany, Italty, France, and Russia; and linguistic issues in the novel’s vision of Ántonia’s acculturation. The second section “Tradition” defines Cather’s relationship to modernism and regionalism through her career shifts and changes to the Introduction as well as her narrative technique in marginalizing violence and darkness to the edges of Jim’s consicousness. The third section “Transgender” analyzes Cather’s relationship to Hamlin Garland’s Life on the Prairie, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and the Neverland, and the work of Truman Capote, especially his gay protagoanist Joel Knox in Other Voices, Other Rooms. The fourth section “Transhuman” deploys work on hysteria to situate Cather’s vision of genderless desire and ecocritical lenses to understand Jim and nature. Finally the last section “Transition” discusses Lena Lingard’s presence as a New Woman and gift economies in the novel that underscore the community’s uneasy transition to twentieth-century capitalism. Gathered in the volume are an international group of scholars who demonstrate the novel’s centrality to women’s studies, American studies, queer studies, childhood studies, psychoanalysis, ecology, translation and reception, Marxism, narratology, and intertextuality.