Willa Cather spent her first nine years in the
Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where her family had lived
for five generations. Even after the Cathers' move to
Nebraska, she came of age in an emphatically southern
extended family, surrounded by Virginia stories, customs,
and controversies. As Eudora Welty has declared, "She did
not come out of Virginia for nothing." Throughout her
career, Cather's fiction drew strength from the people,
places, and issues of the Reconstruction South of her
birth, culminating in her final novel, Sapphira and the
Slave Girl.
This collection of essays is the first to look at this
important southern connection in Cather's writing life.
Ann Romines has brought together eminent Cather critics
and fresh new voices. Judith Fetterley and Lisa Marcus
restore Cather's southern origins to a central place in
her career. Robert K. Miller reads My Mortal Enemy as a
Reconstruction narrative, and Patricia Yaeger theorizes
the racial language of Cather's landscapes. Among several
essays on Sapphira, Mako Yoshikawa's and Tomas Pollard's
contributions explore the novel's racial and sexual
dynamics and abolitionist concerns. Cynthia Griffin Wolff
views Cather's youthful experiments with clothes and
gender as responses to contemporary theater and her
mother's southern feminine style. Other critics compare
Cather to other Southern writers: Allen Tate, Ellen
Glasgow, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison.
Grounded both in traditional literary criticisms and
in cultural studies, these sixteen essays make a
compelling claim for the importance of Cather's southern
connections.
Contributors
Roseanne V. Camacho, University of Louisville
Judith Fetterley, University at Albany, State
University of New York
Lisa Marcus, Pacific Lutheran University
Marilyn Mobley McKenzie, George Mason University
Robert K. Miller, University of St. Thomas
Elsa Nettels, College of William and Mary
Shelley Newman, University of British Columbia
Tomas Pollard, Texas A&M University
Ann Romines, The George Washington University
Mary R. Ryder, South Dakota State University
Merrill Maguire Skaggs, Drew University
Janis P. Stout, Texas A&M University
Joseph R. Urgo, Bryant College
Gayle Wald, The George Washington University
Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
Patricia Yaeger, University of Michigan
Mako Yoshikawa, Harvard University
