"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.

This study of a novel by William T. Vollmann offers a port of entry into his fiction. Like other titles from his planned "Seven Dreams" collection, The Rifles deconstructs the historical novel. Following in the steps of the nineteenth-century English explorer John Franklin, the contemporary American character Subzero risks his life in the Arctic, looking for a way to transcend the history of colonization and his personal limitations. He ventures out on the permafrost of his memory, both private and collective, haunted by history as he revisits the Gothic genre. Deploying the poetry of an anachronistic errand into the white wilderness of snow and ice, in the wake of Herman Melville's Captain Ahab and Edgar Allan Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym, the narrator plays with avatars of the author as an explorer, a historian, a cartographer and a sketch-artist to encounter otherness, whether Inuit women or men, or fellow travelers who exchange with the authorial figure in his search for meaning. This critical analysis uses close-reading, ecocriticism, cultural studies and comparative literature to examine an innovative novel of the post-postmodern canon, by one of the finest contemporary American authors.