Willa Cather and Others

Summary:With a focus on Cather's artistic principle of "the thing not named," Goldberg illuminates the contradictions and complexities inherent in notions of identity and shows how her fiction transforms the very categories--regarding gender, sexuality, race, and class--around which most recent Cather scholarship has focused. The "others" referred to in the title are women, for the most part Cather's contemporaries. They include the Wagnerian diva Olive Fremstad, renowned for her category-defying voice; Blair Niles, an ethnographer and novelist of jazz-age Harlem and the prisons of New Guinea; Laura Gilpin, photographer of the American Southwest; and Pat Barker, whose Regeneration trilogy places World War I writers--and questions of sexuality and gender--at its center. In comparing their artistic projects to Cather's, Goldberg offers innovative insights into a wide range of her novels.--From publisher description