Fakery, authenticity, and identity in American literature and culture at the turn of the 20th century

A compilation of essays focusing on the significance of material culture to Cather’s work and Cather scholarship.

Willa Cather and Material Culture is a collection of 11 new essays that tap into a recent and resurgent interest among Cather scholars in addressing her work and her career through the lens of cultural studies. One of the volume's primary purposes is to demonstrate the extent to which Cather did participate in her culture and to correct the commonplace view of her as a literary connoisseur set apart from her times.

This work explores Edith Wharton's career-long concern with a 19th-century visual culture that limited female artistic agency and expression. Wharton repeatedly invoked the visual arts as a medium for revealing the ways that women's bodies have been represented (as passive, sexualized, infantalized, sickly, dead). Well-versed in the Italian masters, Wharton made special use of the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly its penchant for producing not portraits of individual women but instead icons onto whose bodies male desire is superimposed.

Fulton's examination of Twain's marginalia demonstrates that the "unlettered" Twain approached the writing of his novels with careful research and calculated design.

Boeckmann links character, literary genre, and science, revealing how major literary works both contributed to and disrupted the construction of race in turn-of-the-century America.

Explores literature's social mission at the turn of the century as defined by William Dean Howells and practiced by him and others.

Essays on the roles played by women in forming American attitudes about benevolence and poverty relief