Willa Cather and Material Culture
Willa Cather and Material Culture
Real-World Writing, Writing the Real World
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.
The contributors explore both the objects among which Cather lived and the objects that appear in her writings, as well as the commercial constraints of the publishing industry in which her art was made and marketed. Essays address her relationship to quilts both personally and as symbols in her work; her contributions to domestic magazines such as Home Monthly and Woman's Home Companion; the problematic nature of Hollywood productions of her work; and her efforts and successes as a businesswoman. By establishing the centrality of material matters to her writing, these essays contribute to the reclaiming of Cather as a modernist and highlight the significance of material culture, in general, to the study of American literature.
This collection is significant for focusing attention upon the importance of material culture to Cather and to her writing. Beyond its significance to understanding Cather, the [book] provides a case study of the range of approaches to material culture in American literary studies.'--Susan Rosowski, author of The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism
This tightly edited collection has two objectives: first, to underscore the importance of material objects in Cather’s supposedly unfurnished fiction; second, to remind us of the material conditions under which her work . . . was marketed and sold. Packed with original research . . . the volume achieves both goals. Cather specialists and scholars interested in the American literary marketplace will find Willa Cather and Material Culture absorbing and rewarding.’—Great Plains Quarterly
Willa Cather and Material Culture provides a thought-provoking introduction to cultural studies approaches to Cather . . . [and] avoids some of the faults that such compilations often fall victim to by maintaining focus on the themes announced in the editor’s introduction while also managing to offer a satisfying variety of response. In addition, the collection is instructive about lesser-known work and periods in Cather’s literary life and about her biography and her cultural surrounds.’—Modern Fiction Studies
