Willa Cather and Material Culture
Real-World Writing, Writing the Real World

Janis Stout (Edited by), Janis Stout (Contributions by), Park Bucker (Contributions by), Robert Miller (Contributions by)

9780817357313

Paperback / softback, published 15 June 2012

256 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.4 kg

“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

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.