Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Willa Cather And The Swedes, Mona Pers

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

Index- Fall 1984

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Great Plains Quarterly- Fall 1984

Index (8 Pages)

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

Title & Contents- Fall 1984

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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: …

Review Of The Troll Garden By Willa Cather, David Stouck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

Willa Cather Today, James E. Miller Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

Notes & News- Fall 1984

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes and News

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 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 (through 2013)

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"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 Western American Literary Criticism By Martin Bucco, Helen Winter Stauffer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

Nebraska Naturalism In Jamesian Frames, John J. Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

Review Of Wichita: The Early Years, 1865-1880 By H. Craig Miner, John C. Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

City histories written in the late nineteenth century by amateurs were panegyrics to local men of property and standing. City "biography" was very much just that-a collective biography of the men who made the city what it was. As the discipline of urban history has matured, the view that tied each community's development to the unique personalities of its leaders has given way to an interest in the process of urbanization and the examination of cities as case studies, important primarily because of what they say about the larger urban experience.

Craig Miner's Wichita is a throwback to the …

Review Of The Gate City: A History Of Omaha By Lawrence H. Larsen And Barbara J. Cottrell, Harl A. Dalstrom

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This work, the fourth volume in Pruett Publishing Company's Western Urban History Series, is a survey of the history of Omaha from its founding in 1853-1854 to 1980. It is the third general history of Omaha to be published since 1980 and is the first to give any relatively significant treatment to the city's history in the post-World War II era.

Larsen and Cottrell divide their narrative into ten chapters that cover five periods, each from twenty to thirty years. The narrative of fewer than three hundred pages, including a large number of photos, is synoptic and fast. paced, and …

Notes And News- Summer 1984

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

NOTES & NEWS

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

Review Of Men Of The Steel Rails: Workers On The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, 1869- 1900 By James H. Ducker, Robert H. Zieger

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Using an impressive array of company and union publications, newspapers, directories, and archival materials, James H. Ducker delineates the lives and experiences of the Santa Fe Railroad's labor force. Although he includes three chapters relating to unionism, strike action, and working-class politics, his main focus is on the more private side of his subjects' stories. Even in his chapter on the railroad unions, the author is as interested in the fraternal and social functions they served as in their collective bargaining character.

Ducker carefully places each of his topics in an appropriate historiographical context. When dealing with the strikes of …

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 Platte: Channels In Time By Paul A. Johnsgard, Leslie T. Whipp

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This little book about Nebraska's Platte River is an inch wide and a mile deep.

In both form and content, the book is an argument for the life of the Platte River Valley. The prose text is less than a hundred pages; weaving in and around it are verses from Pawnee songs; maps and aerial photos; photos of animals, birds, and plants. Appendices identify the many different species of life that flourish in the valley, their locales and seasons.

The text takes us from before time until our own time, then confronts us with tomorrow. The author associates the Platte …

Mapping The Interior Plains Of Rupert's Land By The Hudson's Bay Company To 1870, Richard I. Ruggles

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

By royal charter, Charles II in 1670 granted to a small coterie of London entrepreneurs, united in a joint stock company, exclusive trading privileges in a vast territory of then unknown dimensions. The group was the "Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay," the Hudson's Bay Company. The territory was Rupert's Land, named for Prince Rupert, cousin of the monarch, who graciously consented to act as the first governor of the company. By charter, Rupert's Land included "all the Landes Countryes and Territoryes upon the Coastes and Confynes of the Seas" lying within Hudson Strait, that is, the …

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 Shadows Of The Indian: Stereotypes In American Culture By Raymond William Stedman, Paul H. Hutton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Raymond William Stedman approaches the pervasive stereotyping of American Indians with the awe of the devotee of popular culture who was raised on stories of noble warriors and animalistic savages, but also with the outrage of a modern humanist who hopes to reveal and discredit demeaning images. This leads to an interesting dichotomy in the book as the author presents endless examples of insulting-but sometimes entertaining-Indian images from histories, novels, plays, films, and television. After more than two hundred pages of insulting, humorous, and sometimes wonderfully lascivious material, Stedman delivers a twentypage sermon on the evils of such material and …