Willa Cather Scholarly Edition – serie

Willa Cather’s third novel, The Song of the Lark, depicts the growth of an artist, singer Thea Kronborg, a character inspired by the Swedish-born immigrant and renowned Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad. Thea’s early life, however, has much in common with Cather’s own.Set from 1885 to 1909, the novel traces Thea’s long journey from her fictional hometown of Moonstone, Colorado, to her source of inspiration in the Southwest, and to New York and the Metropolitan Opera House. As she makes her way in the world from an unlikely background, Thea distills all her experiences and relationships into the power and passion of her singing, despite the cost. The Song of the Lark presents Cather’s vision of a true artist.The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition includes a historical essay providing fresh insight into the novel and Cather's writing process, photographs and maps, and explanatory notes providing a full range of biographical and historical information. The novel, edited according to standards set by the Committee on Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association, presents a clean, authoritative text of the first edition.

First published in 1923, A Lost Lady is one of Willa Cather's classic novels about life on the Great Plains. It harks back to Nebraska's early history and contrasts those days with an unsentimental portrait of the materialistic world that supplanted the frontier. In her subtle portrait of Marian Forrester, whose life unfolds in the midst of this disquieting transition, Cather created one of her most memorable and finely drawn characters. This Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of A Lost Lady is edited according to standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association. The historical essay describes the origin, writing, and reception of the novel as well as motion pictures that were later based on it; and a selection of archival photographs illuminates the connection between the novel and the people and places from Cather's formative years in Nebraska. Explanatory notes identify locations, literary references, persons, events, and specialized terminology. The textual essays describe the production and subsequent revisions of the text.

The scholarly edition of The Professor's House incorporates into its textual analysis findings from a recently discovered and significantly reworked draft of the novel. Willa Cather's perennial claims that there were no extant drafts make this discovery especially important to Cather scholars. Written in 1925, when she was fifty-two years old, The Professor's House was Cather's seventh novel. Cather explained that in this novel she had attempted two structural experiments. The first experiment she took from the practice of early French and Spanish novelists of inserting a "nouvelle into the roman," hence the first-person "Tom Outland's Story" wedged between the other two parts of the novel. Second, she compared the novel's structure to a sonata form in music, with the center section in significant contrast to the surrounding sectionsBehind the understated prose relating the story of Professor Godfrey St. Peter, who, despite his success, experiences at midcareer a profound disappointment with life, is the fierce account of how he decides to continue living despite those disappointments. Tom Outland's thrilling tale of a long-lost civilization is both an ironic contrast to the professor's staid outer life and a mirror of the imaginative interior life he experiences in his attic study.

Death Comes for the Archbishop sprang from Willa Cather's love for the land and cultures of the American Southwest. Published in 1927 to both praise and perplexity, it has since claimed for itself a major place in twentieth-century literature. When Cather first visited the American Southwest in 1912, she found a new world to imagine and soon came to feel that "the story of the Catholic Church in [the Southwest] was the most interesting of all its stories." The narrative follows Bishop Jean Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant, friends since their childhood in France, as they organize the new Roman Catholic diocese of Santa Fe subsequent to the Mexican War. While seeking to revive the church and build a cathedral in the desert, the clerics, like their historical prototypes, Bishop Jean Lamy and Father Joseph Machebeuf, face religious corruption, natural adversity, and the loneliness of living in a strange and unforgiving land. The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition presents groundbreaking research, establishing a new text that reflects Cather's long and deep involvement with her story. The historical essay traces the artistic and spiritual development that led to its writing. The broad-ranging explanatory notes illuminate the elements of French, Mexican, Hispanic, and Native American cultures that meet in the course of the narrative; they also explain the part played by the land and its people—their history, religion, art, and languages. The textual essay and apparatus reveal Cather's creative process and enable the reader to follow the complex history of the text.

The jacket of the first edition of Obscure Destinies announced "Three New Stories of the West," heralding Willa Cather's return to what many thought of as "her" territory—the Great Plains. These three stories, "Neighbour Rosicky," "Old Mrs. Harris," and "Two Friends," reflected her return to the well of memory that had inspired the books that made her reputation. The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition presents for the first time the three stories in their historical and biographical context, with an interpretive historical essay and detailed explanatory notes. The textual essay and apparatus establish the definitive text and trace Cather's changes through newly discovered prepublication versions.

Although the land on which the Nebraska farm boy Claude Wheeler lives is settled, he himself has inherited the pioneer spirit of adventure, the frontiersman's purpose, and the settler's sense of idealism. In One of Ours, Willa Cather explores the dissonance between Claude's attitudes and his physical reality and studies how this conflict affects him. Drawing on her own family's experience of the war through her cousin G. P. Cather, who fought in World War I, Cather observes how an otherwise misdirected young man could find purpose and meaning in war and how his death would affect his family's memories of him. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, One of Ours paints Claude as a young man who seeks an escape from a conventional and unfulfilling life through the realization of "something splendid" in his military experience in Europe. This Willa Cather Scholarly Edition puts One of Ours in a new and revealing context. The novel is edited according to standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association and presents the full range of biographical, historical, and textual information on the novel.

Willa Cather's twelfth and final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, is her most intense fictional engagement with political and personal conflict. Set in Cather's Virginia birthplace in 1856, the novel draws on family and local history and the escalating conflicts of the last years of slavery—conflicts in which Cather's family members were deeply involved, both as slave owners and as opponents of slavery. Cather, at five years old, appears as a character in an unprecedented first-person epilogue. Tapping her earliest memories, Cather powerfully and sparely renders a Virginia world that is simultaneously beautiful and, as she said, "terrible." The historical essay and explanatory notes explore the novel's grounding in family, local, and national history; show how southern cultures continually shaped Cather's life and work, culminating with this novel; and trace the progress of Cather's research and composition during years of grief and loss that she described as the worst of her life. More early drafts, including manuscript fragments, are available for Sapphira and the Slave Girl than for any other Cather novel, and the revealing textual essay draws on this rich resource to provide new insights into Cather's composition process.

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.

Hailed by reviewers and readers for its originality, vitality, and truth, My Ántonia secured Willa Cather's place in the first rank of American writers. Cather drew deeply on her childhood days in frontier Nebraska for her fourth novel, published in 1918. Ántonia Shimerda is memorable as the warm-hearted daughter of Bohemians who must adapt to a hard life on the desolate prairie. She survives and matures, a pioneer woman made radiant by spirit. This Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of My Ántonia is edited according to standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association and it presents the full range of biographical, historical, and textual information on the novel. The selection of W. T. Benda's illustrations and the historical photography and maps also illuminate the fiction of a writer who drew so extensively on actual experience.

Shadows on the Rock, written after Willa Cather discovered Quebec City during an unplanned stay in 1928, is the second of her "Catholic" historical novels and reflects her fascination with finding a little piece of France in eastern Canada. Set in the late seventeenth century, the novel centers on the activities of the widowed apothecary Euclide Auclair and his young daughter, Cecile. To Auclair's house and shop come trappers, missionaries, craftsmen, the indigent—those seeking cures, a taste of France, or liberation from the corruptions caused there by the excesses of the French court. Set against these fictional characters, historical personages such as Bishop Laval, Count Frontenac, and others contend in the political life of the vast colony. This edition, which is approved by the Modern Language Association, will be of special importance to Cather scholars. Not only is Cather's mining of historical sources explored in extensive explanatory notes, but a recently discovered reworked draft of the novel has been incorporated into the textual analysis. There is also a generous illustration section with maps of the setting.

In 1920 Willa Cather collected eight of the stories she had written over the past twenty years into Youth and the Bright Medusa, stories of the perilous pursuit of the bright medusa of art in a hostile, materialistic world. These include some of her best tales: "Coming, Aphrodite!" focuses on a dedicated painter and his affair with a singer in pursuit of celebrity; "Paul's Case" and "A Wagner Matinée" tell of a young man and an old woman with artistic longings crushed by their environments; "The Sculptor's Funeral" and "The Diamond Mine" show the high costs of success.The historical essay and explanatory notes trace the composition of the stories and their roots in the people, events, and places Cather knew, from her family to world-famous sopranos, from Nebraska and Wyoming to New York and Pittsburgh, with new information on the sources for "Paul's Case." Historical photographs, including a hitherto unknown portrait of the prototype for Paul, show people and places as Cather knew them. The textual essay and apparatus explore the versions that appeared in her lifetime, from first magazine publication to the final collected edition of her works—and describe how the magazine version of "Coming, Aphrodite!" was censored by the editors, even to the title.

Willa Cather’s third novel, The Song of the Lark, depicts the growth of an artist, singer Thea Kronborg, a character inspired by the Swedish-born immigrant and renowned Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad. Thea’s early life, however, has much in common with Cather’s own.Set from 1885 to 1909, the novel traces Thea’s long journey from her fictional hometown of Moonstone, Colorado, to her source of inspiration in the Southwest, and to New York and the Metropolitan Opera House. As she makes her way in the world from an unlikely background, Thea distills all her experiences and relationships into the power and passion of her singing, despite the cost. The Song of the Lark presents Cather’s vision of a true artist.The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition includes a historical essay providing fresh insight into the novel and Cather's writing process, photographs and maps, and explanatory notes providing a full range of biographical and historical information. The novel, edited according to standards set by the Committee on Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association, presents a clean, authoritative text of the first edition.

First published in 1923, A Lost Lady is one of Willa Cather's classic novels about life on the Great Plains. It harks back to Nebraska's early history and contrasts those days with an unsentimental portrait of the materialistic world that supplanted the frontier. In her subtle portrait of Marian Forrester, whose life unfolds in the midst of this disquieting transition, Cather created one of her most memorable and finely drawn characters. This Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of A Lost Lady is edited according to standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association. The historical essay describes the origin, writing, and reception of the novel as well as motion pictures that were later based on it; and a selection of archival photographs illuminates the connection between the novel and the people and places from Cather's formative years in Nebraska. Explanatory notes identify locations, literary references, persons, events, and specialized terminology. The textual essays describe the production and subsequent revisions of the text.

Hailed by reviewers and readers for its originality, vitality, and truth, My Ántonia secured Willa Cather's place in the first rank of American writers. Cather drew deeply on her childhood days in frontier Nebraska for her fourth novel, published in 1918. Ántonia Shimerda is memorable as the warm-hearted daughter of Bohemians who must adapt to a hard life on the desolate prairie. She survives and matures, a pioneer woman made radiant by spirit. This Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of My Ántonia is edited according to standards set by the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association and it presents the full range of biographical, historical, and textual information on the novel. The selection of W. T. Benda's illustrations and the historical photography and maps also illuminate the fiction of a writer who drew so extensively on actual experience.

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.