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.
Author(s): Guy J. Reynolds
Series: (Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century)
Edition: 1
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 256
Tags: Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, American Literature, Feminism, Body Theory
Sensing Willa Cather
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
list of abbreviations
1 Willa Cather in the Realm of the Senses
2 Cather’s Bodily Art and the Emergence of Modernism
3 ‘Sense-dwarfed’: Cather, Aestheticism and a New Corporealism
4 Pale Shades and Living Colours: Cather’s Looks
5 Sound Affects: Music, Voice and Silence in The Song of the Lark, My Mortal Enemy and Lucy Gayheart
6 Touch: Haptic Narrative in The Professor’s House, Shadows on the Rock and Sapphira and the Slave Girl
7 Cather, Taste and National Cuisines: The Professor’s House, Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock
8 Cather’s Smellscapes: Perfumes and Flowers, Disgust and Seduction
9 Conclusion: The Body of the Author
Bibliography and Further Reading
Index
