Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.