Willa Cather's New York: New Essays on Cather in the City [Hardcover]

Merrill Maguire Skaggs (Other Contributor)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 318 pages
• Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (January 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0838638570
• ISBN-13: 978-0838638576
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,334,605 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Willa Cather's New York, December 14, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Willa Cather's New York: New Essays on Cather in the City (Hardcover)

There is something almost obsessive about this collection of essays on Cather's engagement with New York City. These authors have not only visited (almost fetishized) every geographical place associated with Cather, but they have painstakingly combed her work for every possible reference to New York. This collection is an attempt to "rescue" Cather from being known in literary history as "only" a regionalist writer. While I admire the thorough scholarship that went into this work, I feel on the whole that this collection undermines the excellent work that feminist literary critics have done on American women regionalists like Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, etc. The implication behind Skaggs et al's work is that regionalist writing, rather than an important development in American realism, is of lesser value and that Cather is "better" than that.

5.0 out of 5 stars Diverse and exceptionally well written essays, May 23, 2001

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Willa Cather's New York: New Essays on Cather in the City (Hardcover)

Willa Cather's New York: New Essays On Cather In The City is a fascinating and informative collection of essays offering a wide-ranging spectrum of observations on how the pace and diversity of New York City life and its literary community affected, influenced, and was celebrated by Cather's perceptions both in her writing and in her life. The diverse and exceptionally well written essays are arranged in to four major sections: Geographical City and Home Town; Art Capital of the World; City Contacts and Literary Connections; and Urban Perspectives. These informative commentaries are enhanced for the reader with twenty-four illustrations, a list of contributors, and an index. Willa Cather's New York is enthusiastically recommended reading for students of her work and the New York literary establishment of the early decades of the twentieth century.