Something Complete and Great

The Centennial Study of My Ántonia

Edited by Holly Blackford Humes - Contributions by Janis P Stout; Caterina Bernardini; Melissa J Homestead; Diane Prenatt; Sarah L Young; Martin Woodside; Thomas Fahy; Monroe Street; Fangyuan Xi; Jim Cody; Keiko Arai; Dana Woodcock and Zachary Tavlin

This volume situates My Ántonia as a novel that stands the test of time by including in its pages an extraordinarily wide range of historical, cultural, literary, psychological, thematic, perceptual, and stylistic issues. The volume provides an analysis and assessment of complexities in the novel as well as its reception and legacy. The essays as a whole situate the novel at the cusp of the modern period, marking in myriad ways the novel’s transitional role between nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and culture. The first section “Translation” features writers that reflect on Cather’s curious devaluation of My Ántonia’s reception over time; translation issues in Germany, Italty, France, and Russia; and linguistic issues in the novel’s vision of Ántonia’s acculturation. The second section “Tradition” defines Cather’s relationship to modernism and regionalism through her career shifts and changes to the Introduction as well as her narrative technique in marginalizing violence and darkness to the edges of Jim’s consicousness. The third section “Transgender” analyzes Cather’s relationship to Hamlin Garland’s Life on the Prairie, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and the Neverland, and the work of Truman Capote, especially his gay protagoanist Joel Knox in Other Voices, Other Rooms. The fourth section “Transhuman” deploys work on hysteria to situate Cather’s vision of genderless desire and ecocritical lenses to understand Jim and nature. Finally the last section “Transition” discusses Lena Lingard’s presence as a New Woman and gift economies in the novel that underscore the community’s uneasy transition to twentieth-century capitalism. Gathered in the volume are an international group of scholars who demonstrate the novel’s centrality to women’s studies, American studies, queer studies, childhood studies, psychoanalysis, ecology, translation and reception, Marxism, narratology, and intertextuality.

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 293 • Trim: 6¼ x 9¼

978-1-68393-125-6 • Hardback • December 2017 • $123.00 • (£95.00)

978-1-68393-127-0 • Paperback • September 2019 • $53.99 • (£42.00)

978-1-68393-126-3 • eBook • December 2017 • $51.00 • (£39.00)

Series: The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series on Willa Cather

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Women Authors, Literary Criticism / American / General, Literary Collections / LGBT, Literary Criticism / Critical Theory / Marxist Theory, Literary Criticism / Critical Theory / Queer Theory

Something Complete and Great

The Centennial Study of My Ántonia

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

This volume situates My Ántonia as a novel that stands the test of time by including in its pages an extraordinarily wide range of historical, cultural, literary, psychological, thematic, perceptual, and stylistic issues. The volume provides an analysis and assessment of complexities in the novel as well as its reception and legacy. The essays as a whole situate the novel at the cusp of the modern period, marking in myriad ways the novel’s transitional role between nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and culture. The first section “Translation” features writers that reflect on Cather’s curious devaluation of My Ántonia’s reception over time; translation issues in Germany, Italty, France, and Russia; and linguistic issues in the novel’s vision of Ántonia’s acculturation. The second section “Tradition” defines Cather’s relationship to modernism and regionalism through her career shifts and changes to the Introduction as well as her narrative technique in marginalizing violence and darkness to the edges of Jim’s consicousness. The third section “Transgender” analyzes Cather’s relationship to Hamlin Garland’s Life on the Prairie, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and the Neverland, and the work of Truman Capote, especially his gay protagoanist Joel Knox in Other Voices, Other Rooms. The fourth section “Transhuman” deploys work on hysteria to situate Cather’s vision of genderless desire and ecocritical lenses to understand Jim and nature. Finally the last section “Transition” discusses Lena Lingard’s presence as a New Woman and gift economies in the novel that underscore the community’s uneasy transition to twentieth-century capitalism. Gathered in the volume are an international group of scholars who demonstrate the novel’s centrality to women’s studies, American studies, queer studies, childhood studies, psychoanalysis, ecology, translation and reception, Marxism, narratology, and intertextuality.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 293 • Trim: 6¼ x 9¼

978-1-68393-125-6 • Hardback • December 2017 • $123.00 • (£95.00)

978-1-68393-127-0 • Paperback • September 2019 • $53.99 • (£42.00)

978-1-68393-126-3 • eBook • December 2017 • $51.00 • (£39.00)

Series: The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series on Willa Cather

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Women Authors, Literary Criticism / American / General, Literary Collections / LGBT, Literary Criticism / Critical Theory / Marxist Theory, Literary Criticism / Critical Theory / Queer Theory

Author

Holly Blackford is professor of English and writing director at Rutgers University.

Table of Contents

Introduction. “Cather’s Sod House of Fiction,” by Holly Blackford

Part I. Translation
Chapter 1. “Willa Cather's Shifting Reactions to the Reception of My Ántonia: What the Letters Tell Us,” by Janis P. Stout
Chapter 2. “People in countries who read it in the strangest languages”: the International Reception of My Ántonia,” by Caterina Bernardini
Chapter 3. “Lost in Translation: The Mother Tongue in My Ántonia,” by Diane Prenatt

Part II. Tradition
Chapter 4. “Live Property”: Cather’s 1926 Revisions to the Introduction of My Ántonia and the Specter of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Regionalism,” by Melissa J. Homestead
Chapter 5. “Violence in the Pastoral: Darkness in the Narrative Structure of My Ántonia,” by Sarah L. Young

Part III. Transgender
Chapter 6. “Boyhood and the Frontier: Nostalgia and Play in My Ántonia,” by Martin
Woodside
Chapter 7. “The Nebraskan Neverland: The Archeology of Children’s Fantasy Fiction in My Ántonia,” by Holly Blackford
Chapter 8. “‘Obliterating Strangeness’: Cather, Capote, and the Burden of My Ántonia,” by Thomas Fahy

Part III: Transhuman
Chapter 9. “Beyond Gender, Between Persons: Intersubjective Desire in My Ántonia,” by Monroe Street
Chapter 10. “The Image of Nature in the Past in My Ántonia,” by Fangyuan Xi
Chapter 11. “My Ántonia: Keatsian Negative Capability and the Dissolution of Boundaries,” by Jim Cody

Part IV: Transition
Chapter 12. “A Portrait of a Self-Made Woman: Lena Lingard in My Ántonia,” by Keiko Arai
Chapter 13. “The Gift Economies of My Ántonia,” by Dana Woodcock and Zachary Tavlin

Bibliography
About the Contributors