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Review Of Farm Women On The Prairie Frontier: A Sourcebook For Canada And The United States By Carol Fairbanks And Sara Brooks Sundberg, Vernon R. Lindquist

Great Plains Quarterly

This is a book divided-almost against itself. The first half consists of a series of brief essays, the second half a series of annotated bibliographies. The early essays seem caught between a chatty informality and serious scholarship. Added to this apparent indecision about style is a lack of collaboration on focus so that Sundberg's essay, "Early Agricultural Settlement on the Interior Grasslands of North America," seems without significant connection to Fairbanks's essay, "Women and their Visions: Perspectives from Fiction." More importantly, the authors seem confused about the book's purpose. It is called a "sourcebook," which implies a detailed bibliography (which …

Review Of The Troll Garden By Willa Cather, David Stouck

Great Plains Quarterly

In the introduction to this variorum edition of Cather's first collection of stories, James Woodress, distinguished American literature scholar and Cather biographer, points out that Cather regarded her short fiction as her literary apprenticeship and wrote few stories after she began publishing novels. One could also observe that Cather did not develop the genre significantly and accordingly is infrequently anthologized. At the same time, it should be pointed out that her stories are important because they anticipate the novels thematically and, perhaps more importantly, because they provide us with a venue for the development of her craft.

That interest is …

Review Of Western American Literary Criticism By Martin Bucco, Helen Winter Stauffer

Great Plains Quarterly

Martin Bucco's Western American Literary Criticism is a tight, terse compendium of Western American literature and its criticism from the mid-1700s to the present. Beginning with an examination of the relative worth of the early criticism (and finding much of it "a byproduct of the bar and the pulpit"), he discusses the American preoccupation at various times with Western humor, regionalism, morality, and the effect of Marxist criticism on the literature.

With so much territory to cover in so little space, Bucco cannot present a detailed study of the many individuals important to the field, but he manages adroit brief …

Title & Contents- Fall 1984

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

FALL 1984 VOL. 4 NO.4

CONTENTS

WILLA CATHER TODAY: AN INTRODUCTION Mildred R. Bennett and Susan J. Rosowski

WILLA CATHER AND THE SWEDES Mona Pers

WILLA CATHER'S AMERICAN GOTHIC: SAPPHIRA AND THE SLA VE GIRL Susan J. Rosowski

NEBRASKA NATURALISM IN JAMESIAN FRAMES John J. Murphy

CATHER'S LAST THREE STORIES: A TESTAMENT OF LIFE AND ENDURANCE Marilyn Arnold

LIGHT AND SHADOW IN THE CATHER WORLD: A PERSONAL ESSAY Lucia Woods

WILLA CATHER'S NEBRASKA PRIESTS AND DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP L. Brent Bohlke

WILLA CATHER TODAY James E. Miller, Jr.

BOOK REVIEWS

The Troll Garden

Willa Cather: …

Cather's Last Three Stories A Testament Of Life And Endurance, Marilyn Arnold

Great Plains Quarterly

Near the end of her career-and her life-in the conclusion to the story "Before Breakfast," Willa Cather described the "first amphibious frog-toad" who, when he "found his water-hole dried up behind him," undauntedly "jumped out to hop along till he could find another" and in doing so, "started on a long hop."l At first glance, this little parable might appear to be a misplaced curiosity in a story by a Midwesterner about a frazzled businessman seeking refuge on an island off the North Atlantic sea coast. Closer scrutiny reveals it to be essential to the meaning of the story and …

Willa Cather Today An Introduction, Mildred R. Bennett, Susan J. Rosowski

Great Plains Quarterly

The essays in this volume were originally presented in June 1983 at the second national seminar on Willa Cather, "Willa Cather Today." For nearly a week, 125 people gathered in Hastings and Red Cloud, Nebraska, some coming from nearby homes and some traveling from twenty-eight other states, India, China, and Sweden. In doing so, participants had in substance one of the most basic ideas in Cather's writing, that place and movement are complementary. In coming to Webster County, participants affirmed the importance of not only place in Cather's writing but also the journeys that connect lives. In 1981, the theme …

Willa Cather's Nebraska Priests And Death Comes For The Archbishop, L. Brent Bohlke

Great Plains Quarterly

When Willa Cather returned to the prairies of her childhood as a locale for her fiction in O Pioneers! in 1913, she returned to a number of other things as well. Among these were the religious faith and practice of her old neighbors and the importance of this faith to their lives. Cather's experience of rediscovery, struggle, and assimilation of the Christian faith is reflected throughout her Nebraska books and is particularly evident in Death Comes for the Archbishop, written after she, along with her parents, had been confirmed into the Episcopal Church at Grace Church, Red Cloud. Although …

Review Of Critical Essays On Willa Cather Edited By John J. Murphy, Bruce P. Baker

Great Plains Quarterly

John J. Murphy's volume in G. K. Hall's series Critical Essays on American Literature is a significant contribution to Cather studies. In a substantial introduction, Murphy, who presently contributes the annual bibliographical essay "Fiction: 1900-1930" to American Literary Scholarship, has collaborated with Kevin Synnott in surveying Cather scholarship over the years. Both negative and positive reviews as well as important articles and books are chronologically presented and succinctly characterized. Murphy and Synnott give considerably more attention to the reviews than did Bernice Slote's fine bibliographical contribution to Sixteen Modern American Authors (1973); in so doing, they call attention to …

Index- Fall 1984

Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly- Fall 1984

Index (8 Pages)

Review Of Willa Cather: A Bibliography By Joan Crane, Susan J. Rosowski

Great Plains Quarterly

In Willa Cather: A Bibliography, Joan Crane has surpassed our fondest hopes for a bibliography that would establish and describe the Cather canon. This is a volume that will be invaluable to collectors and booksellers, textual critics, and literary scholars.

By following rigorous standards of analytical description, Crane provides the specialized information that booksellers, private persons, and librarians need to collect and preserve Cather's printed writing. Ordinarily, the needs of the collector, who focuses on physical characteristics, seem different from those of the literary scholar, who focuses on content. But this separation is neither so easy nor so clear …

Willa Cather Today, James E. Miller Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly

From 1947, the year Willa Cather died, until today, Cather studies have expanded from a Nebraska cottage craft to an international industry. During this time the number of publications about her life and work has become formidable. Recently I made an assault on the ever taller mountain of Cather material, and although I have not reached the peak, I have spent considerable time slogging up some treacherous slopes. What I present here is a bundle of my own biases, selective in nature, without any pretense of comprehensiveness. I would like first to take a brief look at three works on …

Nebraska Naturalism In Jamesian Frames, John J. Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly

So much has been written about Willa Cather and the influence of the classics and later European literature that one sometimes forgets the American literary climate in which she developed. It was a postromantic age of realism, epitomized by William Dean Howells's attempt to limit fiction to normal characters in commonplace situations, which would make of it, as Cather complained, a "sort of young lady's illusion preserver." But the new breed of "naturalists," Cather's contemporaries, were in revolt against Howells and his more accomplished contemporary, Henry James, and advocated a return to romance without the chivalric trappings of Walter Scott …

Willa Cather And The Swedes, Mona Pers

Great Plains Quarterly

Willa Cather's immigrant characters, almost a literary anomaly at the time she created them, earned her widespread critical and popular acclaim, not least in the Scandinavian countries, a market she was already eager to explore at the beginning of her literary career. Sweden, the first Scandinavian country to "discover" her books, issued more translations of Cather fiction than any other European country. In fact, Sweden was ten years ahead of any other Scandinavian country in publishing the translation of a Cather novel (see table). This article will investigate the publication and reception of Willa Cather's books in Sweden, compare that …

Light And Shadow In The Cather World A Personal Essay, Lucia Woods

Great Plains Quarterly

I want to explore with you my feelings about the polarity of light and shadow in Willa Cather's world and in my own experience as illuminated by that world. Carl Jung said, "Evil needs to be pondered just as much as good, for good and evil are ultimately nothing but ideal extensions and abstractions of doing, and both belong to the chiaroscuro of life. In the last resort there is no good that cannot produce evil and no evil that cannot produce good."

I won't take on evil as much as the deeper greys. I became more aware of them …

Review Of Willa: The Life Of Willa Cather By Phyllis C. Robinson, John J. Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly

"I dwell in possibility," one of Emily Dickinson's memorable fIrst lines, would be an appropriate epigraph for this biographical study, which titilates the reader with suppositions about Cather's attachments to other women. For example, Louise Pound was an early "infatuation" for two years, until Cather attacked brother Roscoe Pound because "he must have hurt her in a way she could not forgive .... Had he found himself attracted to her and been rebuffed? Had he lashed out and bullied her for preferring his sister to himself? Perhaps he made fun of her attachment to Louise? Perhaps he did more than …

Review Of Labyrinths Of Voice: Conversations With Robert Kroetsch By Shirley Neuman And Robert Wilson, George E. Wolf

Great Plains Quarterly

Some years ago, in an interview with fellow praine writer Margaret Laurence, Robert Kroetsch remarked, "You and I, because we are western Canadians, are involved in making a new literature out of a new experience." Kroetsch's published works (seven novels, a volume of collected poems, a book on Alberta, and a host of stories, critical essays, and interviews) are now a vital part of this new literature, and anyone interested in the life of the imagination in prairie Canada must read and savor-and sometimes contend with-Robert Kroetsch.

It is good, therefore, to have Labyrinths of Voice available in the Western …

Willa Cather's American Gothic Sapphira And The Slave Girl, Susan J. Rosowski

Great Plains Quarterly

Willa Cather's plains novels provide the lens through which readers approach her canon. Starting with O Pioneers!, My Àntonia, A Lost Lady, and the other Nebraska novels, critics have identified her major themes (the noble pioneer, the frontier, the creative imagination) and described her development (generally some version of an initial optimism over the frontier period followed by an elegiac lament for the pioneer past). From such a viewpoint, Cather's last book, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, seems an aberration, which, if treated at all, is seen as an escape into a pre-Civil War southern setting, remote …

Notes & News- Fall 1984

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes and News

CENTER FOR GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

QUERIES & ACQUISITIONS

RELATED SYMPOSIA

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

Review Of Conversations With Wallace Stegner On Western History And Literature By Wallace Stegner And Richard W. Etulain, Kenneth C. Mason

Great Plains Quarterly

Any new book by Wallace Stegner is a cause for celebration among students of the fiction and history of the American West, and this collection of ten interviews, conducted by Richard W. Etulain in 1980 and 1981, is an event of signal importance to all admirers of Stegner's work. The interviews begin with biographical clarifications, treat the fiction next (with separate chapters on The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Angle of Repose), and then turn to the Mormons, western literature, western history, and the western wilderness, with a concluding miscellaneous chapter.

The transcripts of the interviews were revised only …

Review Of Mari Sandoz: Story Catcher Of The Plains By Helen Winter Stauffer, Robert Gish

Great Plains Quarterly

Invariably the name of Mari Sandoz is associated with the Great Plains and more particularly with Nebraska. As Helen Winter Stauffer's comprehensive biography, Mari Sandoz: Story Catcher of the Plains, makes clear, such an association had both its advantages and disadvantages in Sandoz's life and in her career as a writer. Like other authors who for better or worse come to be known as regional, Sandoz had to reconcile knowing her home intimately and being inspired by the "spirit" of that place with the need to transcend and universalize her home and her life stories through the very form …

Review Of Rodeo: An Anthropologist Looks At The Wild And The Tame By Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence, John W. Bennett

Great Plains Quarterly

Anthropologists have been slow to take up intensive fieldwork in American life, partly because their professional training has emphasized that "the exotic" is something found only in remote tribal societies, not in urbanized North America. But with the transformation of tribal cultures into developing nations, anthropologists have begun to turn to their own culture and have found it possible to see it as exotic. This book is an example of that new genre. The author has unusual equipment for the task: she was trained as a veterinarian and also as an anthropologist, and her study of rodeo grew out of …

Review Of The Cattle Guard By James F. Hoy, R. Douglas Hurt

Great Plains Quarterly

For anyone who has traveled the back roads and trails of the range country in the Great Plains, the cattle guard is a familiar and welcome sight. It is an open gate that enables cars and trucks to pass through a fence but prevents livestock from getting out of pastures. Although many styles exist, the cattle guard essentially is a pipe, bar, or wooden grid laid over an open pit or trench. The bars are spaced so that livestock will not walk on them for fear their hooves will slip through. No one can say when the first cattle guard …

Review Of Many Tender Ties: Women In Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870 By Sylvia Van Kirk, Olive Patricia Dickason

Great Plains Quarterly

The bittersweet story of women in the fur trade of the Canadian Northwest has been a long time in the telling. According to standard historical interpretations, trading furs was an exclusively male domain; related activity, particularly if it involved women, was seen as peripheral, and often as libertine. As Sylvia Van Kirk makes clear, however, that is a one-sided view at best; the previously dismissed social aspect of the fur trade was far more important than has generally been assumed.

The Hudson's Bay Company did its official best to prevent alliances from developing between its men and Amerindian women. This …

Review Of Plains Indian Studies: A Collection Of Essays In Honor Of John C. Ewers And Waldo R. Wedel Edited By Douglas H. Ubelaker And Herman J. Viola, Warren W. Caldwell

Great Plains Quarterly

A dual Festschrift is unusual, but here we have one celebrating a collective century of achievement by John Ewers and Waldo Wedel, two scholars of the first rank. Ewers and Wedel, long-time colleagues at the Smithsonian Institution, are well known to historians and anthropologists with special interests in the plains of North America. Indeed, each has contributed to the basic structure of their respective disciplines: Ewers essentially to ethnology and Wedel to archeology. Neither scholar worked within a strictly academic setting and thus, neither had students in the usual sense, yet Ewers and Wedel have been remarkably influential and are …

Review Of A Bibliographical Guide To The Study Of Western American Literature By Richard W. Etulain, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly

As Richard Etulain states in his preface, this is a comprehensive but not exhaustive bibliography of books, dissertations, and articles about western American literature. The bulk of the volume lists materials on more than 350 major western authors, including some major historians and nonfiction writers, but perhaps the most significant part of the book is the section dealing with seven important aspects of the field that suggest ways of arranging research to go beyond individual works and authors to overviews and generalizations.

Etulain's categories are: (1) local color and regionalism, (2) popular western literaturedime novels and the Western, (3) western …

Review Of Prairie Mosaic: An Ethnic Atlas Of Rural North Dakota By William C. Sherman, Robert C. Ostergren

Great Plains Quarterly

Ethnic atlases appeal to the general public because they graphically verify long suspected or perceived patterns of local or regional cultural differentiation. They are useful to academia because the geographic pattern portrayed is a variable that is basic to a wide variety of scholarly inquiries. Unfortunately, good ethnic atlases are few in number because compiling the data necessary to accurately describe ethnic patterns at an appropriate scale is a difficult and time-consuming task that few are willing to undertake. Those who have the patience to do this kind of work deserve our admiration and thanks.

This atlas is the work …

Review Of The Thunderstorm In Human Affairs Edited By Edwin Kessler, Alec H. Paul

Great Plains Quarterly

This magnificent book is copiously endowed with figures and photographs, with generous pages of eight and one-half by eleven inches. The book is organized and written in such a way that the interested layperson, the meteorology student, and the thunderstorm researcher will all benefit from it. The list of authors reads like an American "who's who" of specialists in the field of thunderstorms.

The book is a project of the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, and it has much to interest residents of the Great Plains although its geographic scope encompasses the entire United States. Kessler has produced …

Review Of Inventing Billy The Kid: Visions Of The Outlaw In America, 1881-1981 By Stephen Tatum, Kent L. Steckmesser

Great Plains Quarterly

Here is a sophisticated study of an individual who is both a "timeless conventional outlaw and a timely invented outlaw." Tatum traces the changes in the images of Billy the Kid over one century, relating them to concurrent social and cultural circumstances. The historical William H. Bonney is accorded one chapter, but the book's main concern is the multitude of interpreters who have created their own versions of his life in works ranging from dime novels and biographies to ballets and films.

Initially, between 1881 and 1900, the Kid's biography was formulated as a "romance." As a "bad" badman, a …

Review Of Plains Families: Exploring Sociology Through Social History By Scott G. Mcnall And Sally Allen Mcnall, J. Allen Williams

Great Plains Quarterly

Scott and Sally McNall, of the University of Kansas, provide a new and interesting way to teach sociology. Plains Families uses the social history of the Great Plains region of the United States from the 1860s to the present to demonstrate how abstract sociological ideas and concepts are grounded in reality.

A variety of source materials (e.g., letters, diaries, interviews) are used by the authors to construct composite case histories of families. The presentation of each case is followed by a chapter designed to illustrate a major dimension of sociology. The illustration, in turn, affords the reader a much better …

Title And Contents- Summer 1984

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

SUMMER 1984 VOL. 4 NO.3

CONTENTS

THE PRAIRIE MERMAID: LOVE-TESTS OF PIONEER WOMEN Robert H. Solomon

MAPPING THE INTERIOR PLAINS OF RUPERT'S LAND BY THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY TO 1870 Richard I. Ruggles

THE IMAGE OF THE HIRED GIRL IN LITERATURE: THE GREAT PLAINS, 1860 TO WORLD WAR I Sylvia Lea Sallquist

BOOK REVIEWS

Red Harvest: The Communist Party and American Farmers

Interwoven: A Pioneer Chronicle

Lambshead Before Interwoven: A Texas Range Chronicle, 1848-1878

Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800-1915

Montana's Righteous Hangmen: The Vigilantes in Action

Belle Starr and Her Times: The Literature, the Facts …