A groundbreaking new look at American novelist Willa Cather's creative process What would Willa Cather's widely read and cherished novels have looked like if she had never met magazine editor and copywriter Edith Lewis? In this groundbreaking book on Cather's relationship with her life partner, author Melissa J. Homestead counters the established portrayal of Cather as a solitary genius and reassesses the role that Lewis, who has so far been rendered largely invisible by scholars, played in shaping Cather's work. Inviting Lewis to share the spotlight alongside this pivotal American writer, Homestead argues that Lewis was not just Cather's companion but also her close literary collaborator and editor. Drawing on an array of previously unpublished sources, Homestead skillfully reconstructs Cather and Lewis's life together, from their time in New York City to their travels in the American Southwest that formed the basis of the novels The Professor's House and Death Comes for the Archbishop. After Cather's death and in the midst of the Cold War panic over homosexuality, the story of her life with Edith Lewis could not be told, but by telling it now, Homestead offers a refreshing take on lesbian life in early twentieth-century America.

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.

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.

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.

Through an exploration of women authors' engagements with copyright and married women's property laws, American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869, revises nineteenth-century American literary history, making women's authorship and copyright law central. Using case studies of five popular fiction writers - Catharine Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, Augusta Evans, and Mary Virginia Terhune - Homestead shows how the convergence of copyright and coverture both fostered and constrained white women's agency as authors. Women authors exploited their status as nonproprietary subjects to advantage by adapting themselves to a copyright law that privileged readers'access to literature over authors' property rights. Homestead's inclusion of the Confederacy in this work sheds light on the centrality of copyright to nineteenth-century American nationalisms and on the strikingly different construction of author reader relations under U.S. and Confederate copyright laws.

Through an exploration of women authors' engagements with copyright and married women's property laws, American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869, revises nineteenth-century American literary history, making women's authorship and copyright law central. Using case studies of five popular fiction writers - Catharine Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, Augusta Evans, and Mary Virginia Terhune - Homestead shows how the convergence of copyright and coverture both fostered and constrained white women's agency as authors. Women authors exploited their status as nonproprietary subjects to advantage by adapting themselves to a copyright law that privileged readers'access to literature over authors' property rights. Homestead's inclusion of the Confederacy in this work sheds light on the centrality of copyright to nineteenth-century American nationalisms and on the strikingly different construction of author reader relations under U.S. and Confederate copyright laws.

The prolific nineteenth-century writer E. D. E. N. Southworth enjoyed enormous public success in her day--she published nearly fifty novels during her career--but that very popularity, combined with her gender, led to her almost complete neglect by the critical establishment before the emergence of academic feminism. Even now, most scholarship on Southworth focuses on her most famous novel, The Hidden Hand. However, this new book--the first since the 1930s devoted entirely to Southworth--shows the depth of her career beyond that publication and reassesses her place in American literature.
Editors Melissa Homestead and Pamela Washington have gathered twelve original essays from both established and emerging scholars that set a new agenda for the study of E. D. E. N. Southworth's works. Following an introduction by the editors, these articles are divided into four thematic clusters. The first, "Serial Southworth," treats her fiction in periodical publication contexts. "Southworth's Genres," the second grouping, considers her use of a range of genres beyond the sentimental novel and the domestic novel. In the third part, "Intertextual Southworth," the essays present intensive case studies of Southworth's engagement with literary traditions such as Greek and Restoration drama and with her contemporaries such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and French novelist George Sand. Southworth's focus on social issues and reform figures prominently throughout the volume, but the pieces in the fourth section, "Southworth, Marriage, and the Law," present a sustained inquiry into the ways in which marriage law and the status of women in the nineteenth century engaged her literary imagination.
The collection concludes with the first chronological bibliography of Southworth's fiction organized by serialization date rather than book publication. For the first time, scholars will be able to trace the publication history of each novel and will be able to access citations for lesser-known and previously unknown works.
With its fresh approach, this volume will be of great value to students and scholars of American literature, women's studies, and popular culture studies.
MELISSA J. HOMESTEAD is the Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her book American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869 includes Southworth, and her articles on American women's writing have been published in a variety of academic journals.
PAMELA T. WASHINGTON is Professor of English and former dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Central Oklahoma. She is the co-author of Fresh Takes: Explorations in Reading and Writing: A Freshman Composition Text.