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A radical reinterpretation of Willa Cather's oeuvre Deploying the
concepts and techniques of Body Studies, Guy J. Reynolds remaps
Cather's vast and diverse range of writing from the 1890s through
to 1940. His study of embodiment and narrative focuses on the
senses and reads Cather as a writer at the transition from late
Victorian to Modernist modes of representation. The book presents
suggestive new ways of understanding her depictions of disability,
male bodies and Native American culture, not to mention her
narratives of whiteness and of the black body.
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.
Over the five decades of her writing career Willa Cather responded
to, and entered into dialogue with, shifts in the terrain of
American life. These cultural encounters informed her work as much
as the historical past in which much of her writing is based.
Cather was a multifaceted cultural critic, immersing herself in the
arts, broadly defined: theater and opera, art, narrative, craft
production. Willa Cather and the Arts shows that Cather repeatedly
engaged with multiple forms of art, and that even when writing
about the past she was often addressing contemporary questions. The
essays in this volume are informed by new modes of
contextualization, including the increasingly popular view of
Cather as a pivotal or transitional figure working between and
across very different cultural periods and by the recent
publication of Cather's correspondence. The collection begins by
exploring the ways Cather encountered and represented high and low
cultures, including Cather's use of "racialized vernacular" in
Sapphira and the Slave Girl. The next set of essays demonstrates
how historical research, often focusing on local features in
Cather's fiction, contributes to our understanding of American
culture, from musicological sources to the cultural development of
Pittsburgh. The final trio of essays highlights current Cather
scholarship, including a food studies approach to O Pioneers! and
an examination of Cather's use of ancient philosophy in The
Professor's House. Together the essays reassess Cather's lifelong
encounter with, and interpretation and reimagining of, the arts.
Engineer Bartley Alexander appears to have a happy life in Boston
with a successful career and a beautiful wife. He has been
commissioned to design the Moorlock Bridge in Canada, the most
important project of his career. With the onset of middle age,
however, he grows increasingly restless and discontented, so much
so that while in London he recklessly reignites a love affair with
the sweetheart of his youth, the Irish actress Hilda Borgoyne.
Although the tryst allows Alexander to recapture an element that
has been missing from his pedestrian life, the relationship
torments his sense of morality and eventually proves disastrous.
"Alexander's Bridge" explores the demands of Gilded Age society on
the individual, as well as the capacity of the individual to
violate his own standards of integrity. This Willa Cather Scholarly
Edition provides an illuminating new framework for Cather's debut
novel. The novel is edited according to standards set by the
Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association
and presents the full range of biographical, historical, and
textual information now available, complete with illustrations and
maps.
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Alexander's Bridge (Paperback)
Willa Cather; Edited by Frederick M Link; Introduction by Guy J. Reynolds
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R321
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Engineer Bartley Alexander appears to have a happy life in Boston
with a successful career and a beautiful wife. He has been
commissioned to design the Moorlock Bridge in Canada, the most
important project of his career. With the onset of middle age,
however, he grows increasingly restless and discontented, so much
so that while in London he recklessly reignites a love affair with
the sweetheart of his youth, the Irish actress Hilda Borgoyne.
Although the tryst allows Alexander to recapture an element that
has been missing from his pedestrian life, the relationship
torments his sense of morality and eventually proves disastrous.
Alexander's Bridge explores the demands of Gilded Age society on
the individual, as well as the capacity of the individual to
violate his own standards of integrity. This Willa Cather Scholarly
Edition provides an illuminating new framework for Cather's debut
novel. The novel is edited according to standards set by the
Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association
and presents the full range of biographical, historical, and
textual information now available, complete with illustrations and
maps.
Linking Willa Cather to "the modern" or "modernism" still seems an
eccentric proposition to some people. Born in 1873, Cather felt
tied to the past when she witnessed the emergence of
twentieth-century modern culture, and the clean, classical
sentences in her fiction contrast starkly with the radically
experimental prose of prominent modernists. Nevertheless, her
representations of place in the modern world reveal Cather as a
writer able to imagine a startling range of different
cultures.
Divided into two sections, the essays in "Cather Studies," "Volume
9" examine Willa Cather as an author with an innovative receptivity
to modern cultures and a powerful affinity with the visual and
musical arts. From the interplay between modern and antimodern in
her representations of native culture to the music and visual arts
that animated her imagination, the essays are unified by an
understanding of Cather as a writer of transition whose fiction
meditates on the cultural movement from Victorianism into the
twentieth century.
Engineer Bartley Alexander appears to have a happy life in Boston
with a successful career and a beautiful wife. He has been
commissioned to design the Moorlock Bridge in Canada, the most
important project of his career. With the onset of middle age,
however, he grows increasingly restless and discontented, so much
so that while in London he recklessly reignites a love affair with
the sweetheart of his youth, the Irish actress Hilda Borgoyne.
Although the tryst allows Alexander to recapture an element that
has been missing from his pedestrian life, the relationship
torments his sense of morality and eventually proves disastrous.
Alexander's Bridge explores the demands of Gilded Age society on
the individual, as well as the capacity of the individual to
violate his own standards of integrity. This Willa Cather Scholarly
Edition provides an illuminating new framework for Cather's debut
novel. The novel is edited according to standards set by the
Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association
and presents the full range of biographical, historical, and
textual information now available, complete with illustrations and
maps.
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