Willa Cather and Others

After many years as one of the premier scholars of English Renaissance literature, Jonathan Goldberg turns his attention to the work of American novelist Willa Cather. With a focus on Cather’s artistic principle of the thing not named,
Willa Cather and Others illuminates the contradictions and complexities inherent in notions of identity and shows how her fiction transforms the very categories - regarding gender, sexuality, race, and class - around which most Cather scholarship has focused. The others referred to in the title are women, for the most part Cather’s contemporaries, whose artistic projects allow for points of comparison with Cather. They include the Wagnerian diva Olive Fremstad, renowned for her category-defying voice; Blair Niles, an ethnographer and novelist of jazz-age Harlem and the prisons of New Guinea; Laura Gilpin, photographer of the American Southwest; and Pat Barker, whose Regeneration trilogy places World War I writers - and questions of sexuality and gender - at its centre. In the process of studying these women and their work, Goldberg forms innovative insights into a wide range of Cather’s celebrated works, from O Pioneers! and My Antonia to her later books The Song of the Lark , One of Ours , The Professor’s House , Death Comes for the Archbishop , and Sapphira and the Slave Girl.