Cather Among the Moderns

“Many scholars—among them Jo Ann Middleton in Willa Cather’s Modernism and Rick Middleton in various writings—have convincingly argued that certain fictions by Willa Cather (1873–1947) exhibit many of the traits usually associated with modernist art of the early 20th century: experimentation with form, disruption of conventional ways of seeing “reality,” and a questioning of traditional morals, values, and societal structures. Stout seeks not only to expand this list to include other Cather works—O Pioneers!, A Lost Lady, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Shadows on the Rock—but also to demonstrate that Cather herself was ‘modern’ (synonymous with 'progressive' and 'liberal') in her actions and attitudes, and thus should be seen as closely akin to her American modernist writer contemporaries. Stout offers a number of persuasive arguments concerning Cather’s modernist literary techniques but does not present sufficient evidence to dispel the prevailing understanding of Cather as a person who (except in the case of exploring alternative roles for women) held rather conventional views for her time, and neither actively engaged in the types of activities nor adhered to the same types of liberal beliefs that most modernist American writers did.”
—CHOICE

“Cather Among the Moderns offers a considerable contribution to Willa Cather studies, demonstrating exemplary scholarship in blending close literary analysis with historical and biographical insights.”
—Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature

“Cather Among the Moderns is a major contribution to the field of Cather scholarship. It will immediately be a touchstone for anyone working on Cather; with its groundbreaking study of the relationships between Cather and a range of other authors and their works, from Dorothy Canfield Fisher to Virginia Woolf and Robert Frost, it will also serve as a wonderful resource for future studies. Further, it helps us understand literary modernism, and modernism itself, in deeper and more nuanced ways.”
—Julie Olin-Ammentorp, author of Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War and a member of the Board of Governors of the Willa Cather Foundation