Cather Studies, Volume 14: Unsettling Cather

American author Willa Cather was born and spent her first nine years in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Here, as an observant daughter of a privileged white family, Cather first encountered differences and dislocations that remained lively, productive, and sometimes deeply troubling sites of tension and energy throughout her writing life.

The essays in Cather Studies, Volume 14 seek to unsettle prevailing assumptions about Cather’s work as she moved from Virginia to Nebraska to Pittsburgh to New York City to New Mexico and farther west, and to Grand Manan Island. The essays range from examinations of how race shapes and misshapes Cather’s final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, to challenges to criticisms of her 1935 novel, Lucy Gayheart. Contributors also frame fresh discussions of Cather’s literary influences and cultural engagements in the first decade of her career as a novelist through the lens of sex and gender and examine Cather’s engagements with region as a geopolitical, sociolinguistic, and literary site. Together, the essays offer compelling ways of seeing and situating Cather’s texts--both unsettling and advancing Cather scholarship.

Marilee Lindemann is an associate professor of English and executive director of College Park Scholars at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Willa Cather: Queering America and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather, Alexander’s Bridge, and O Pioneers!Ann Romines is professor emerita of English at the George Washington University. She is the author of The Home Plot: Women, Writing, and Domestic Ritual and many essays on Cather. She is the editor of Willa Cather’s Southern Connections: New Essays on Cather and the South and At Willa Cather’s Tables and the historical editor of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of Sapphira and the Slave Girl.