"In a land where there is constant migration, can there be a "homeland"? In the United States, migration is initially experienced as immigration, but the process never achieves closure. Migration continues as transience - restless, unsettled movement across social and economic classes, states, and national borders. In this nuanced study grounded in literature, history, and popular culture, Joseph Urgo demonstrates that American culture and our sense of national identity are permeated by unrelenting, incessant, and psychic mobility across spatial, historical, and imaginative planes of existence." "There is no better example of a writer reflecting on this migratory consciousness than Willa Cather. At home in numerous locations - Nebraska, New York, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Maine, and Canada - Cather infused her novels with the cultural vitality that is a consequence of transience. By locating transience at the center of his conception of our national culture, Urgo redefines the mythos of American national identity and global empire. He concludes with an analysis of a potential "New World Order" in which migration replaces homeland as the foundation of world power."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The American Southwest was arguably as formative a landscape for Willa Cather?s aesthetic vision as was her beloved Nebraska. Both landscapes elicited in her a sense of raw incompleteness. They seemed not so much finished places as things unassembled, more like countries ?still waiting to be made into [a] landscape.? Cather?s fascination with the Southwest led to its presence as a significant setting in three of her most ambitious novels: The Song of the Lark, The Professor?s House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. This volume focuses a sharp eye on how the landscape of the American Southwest served Cather creatively and the ways it shaped her research and productivity. No single scholarly methodology prevails in the essays gathered here, giving the volume rare depth and complexity.

An enlightening unpacking of Cather's writings, from her controversial love letters of the 1890s--in which "queer" is employed to denote sexual deviance--to her epic novels, short stories, and critical writings.

The American Southwest was arguably as formative a landscape for Willa Cather?s aesthetic vision as was her beloved Nebraska. Both landscapes elicited in her a sense of raw incompleteness. They seemed not so much finished places as things unassembled, more like countries ?still waiting to be made into [a] landscape.? Cather?s fascination with the Southwest led to its presence as a significant setting in three of her most ambitious novels: The Song of the Lark, The Professor?s House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. This volume focuses a sharp eye on how the landscape of the American Southwest served Cather creatively and the ways it shaped her research and productivity. No single scholarly methodology prevails in the essays gathered here, giving the volume rare depth and complexity.

Willa Cather's elegiac tales of the pioneer experience on the American frontier continue to captivate new generations of readers. Written especially for students, this critical introduction offers insightful yet accessible criticism of Cather's most widely read novels. A full chapter examines each work, with full discussions of character development, thematic concerns, plot, critical reception, and historical contexts. Students will find this book a valuable guide to this great American author. The volume covers such enduring works as Alexander's Bridge, O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, My D'Antonia, The Professor's House, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Shadows on the Rock. Each chapter is devoted to an individual novel and provides a full discussion of character development, thematic concerns, and plot structure. The introduction to each novel traces its genesis and its critical reception at the time of publication. The historical context sections place Cather's vision of the pioneer spirit and achievement within the context of a rapidly changing America that was in the process of abandoning its traditional values and thus risking its source of greatness. Students will find this book a valuable guide to Cather's works.

What can there possibly be left to say about . . .? This common litany, resonant both in and outside of academia, reflects a growing sense that the number of subjects and authors appropriate for literary study is rapidly becoming exhausted. Take heart, admonishes Richard Kopley in this dynamic new anthology--for this is decidedly not the case. While generations of literary study have unquestionably covered much ground in analyzing canonical writers, many aspects of even the most well-known authors--both their lives and their work-- remain underexamined. Among the authors discussed are T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry James, Willa Cather, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain.

Cather Studies 4 contains eighteen essays and elaborates a theme, ?Willa Cather?s Canadian and Old World Connections.? Such connections are central to Cather?s art and artistry. She transported much from the Old World to the New, shaping her antecedents to tell, in new ways, the stories of Nebraska, of the American Southwest, and especially of Quebec, in Shadows on the Rock. ø David Stouck details Cather?s numerous Canadian connections, Richard Millington treats her ?anthropological? re-creation of the cultural moment of seventeenth-century Quebec, and Franöois Palleau-Papin finds ?The Hidden French in Cather?s English.? A volume of lively and informed criticism, Cather Studies 4 vividly demonstrates Cather?s artistry and her work?s deep connections to the present cultural and critical moment.