Susan J. Rosowski – författare

Willa Cather said that O Pioneers! was her first authentic novel, "the first time I walked off on my own feet—everything before was half real and half an imitation of writers whom I admired." Cather's novel of life on the Nebraska frontier established her reputation as a writer of great note and marked a significant turning point in her artistic development. No longer would she let literary convention guide the form of her writing; the materials themselves would dictate the structure. The paperback edition contains all the text and scholarly apparatus found in the original Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Edited according to standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association, this volume presents the full range of biographical, historical, and textual information on the novel.

Volume 3 of Cather Studies demonstrates the range of topics and approaches in contemporary discussions of Willa Cather's work for the informed reader or the specialized student. In fourteen essays, critics and scholars examine Cather's Catholic Progressivism, her literary relations with William Faulkner, and her place in the multicultural canon of American literature.

The wide-ranging essays collected in this volume of Cather Studies examine Willa Cather's unique artistic relationship to the environment. Under the theoretical rubric of ecocriticism, these essays focus on Cather's close observations of the natural world and how the environment proves, for most of these contributors, to be more than simply a setting for her characters. While it is certain that Cather's novels and short stories are deeply grounded in place, literary critics are only now considering how place functions within her narratives and addressing environmental issues through her writing. These essays reintroduce us to a Cather who is profoundly identified with the places that shaped her and that she wrote about: Glen A. Love offers an interdisciplinary reading of The Professor's House that is scientifically oriented; Joseph Urgo argues that My Ántonia models a preservationist aesthetic in which landscape and memory are inextricably entangled; Thomas J. Lyon posits that Cather had a living sense of the biotic community and used nature as the standard of excellence for human endeavors; and Jan Goggans considers the ways that My Ántonia shifts from nativism toward a "flexible notion of place-based community."

Willa Cather said that O Pioneers! was her first authentic novel, "the first time I walked off on my own feet—everything before was half real and half an imitation of writers whom I admired." Cather's novel of life on the Nebraska frontier established her reputation as a writer of great note and marked a significant turning point in her artistic development. No longer would she let literary convention guide the form of her writing; the materials themselves would dictate the structure. The paperback edition contains all the text and scholarly apparatus found in the original Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Edited according to standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association, this volume presents the full range of biographical, historical, and textual information on the novel.