Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture

Julie Olin-Ammentorp (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

396 Seiten

2025
University of Nebraska Press (Verlag)
978-1-4962-4460-4 (ISBN)

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Edith Wharton and Willa Cather wrote many of the most enduring American novels from the first half of the twentieth century, including Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence, and Cather’s O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. Yet despite their perennial popularity and their status as major American novelists, Wharton (1862–1937) and Cather (1873–1947) have rarely been studied together. Indeed, Wharton is seen as “our literary aristocrat,” an author who chronicles the lives of the East Coast, Europe-bound elite, while Cather is considered a prairie populist who describes the lives of rugged Western pioneers. But these depictions neglect the striking and important ways the works of these two authors intersect.

The first comparative study of Wharton and Cather in more than thirty years, this book reveals Wharton’s and Cather’s parallel experiences of dislocation, their relationship to each other as writers, and the profound similarities in their theories of fiction. Julie Olin-Ammentorp explores the importance of literary and geographic place in their lives and works, including the role of New York City, the American West, France, and travel. In doing so she reveals the two authors’ shared concern about the culture of place and the place of culture in the United States.

Julie Olin-Ammentorp is a professor emerita of English at Le Moyne College (Syracuse, New York). She is the author of Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War, editor of the Oxford World’s Classic edition of Wharton’s novel A Son at the Front, and a former member of the Board of Governors of the Willa Cather Foundation. She lives in Minnesota.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Wharton, Cather, Place, and Culture
Part 1. Contexts and Intersections
1. The “Literary Aristocrat” and the Plainspoken Pioneer
2. The Land of Letters, the Kingdom of Art
Part 2. The Place of Culture
3. New York City: Beauty, Business, and Hothouse Flowers
4. The West: Provinciality, Vitality, and the “Real” America
5. The Idea of France
6. Questions of Travel and Home
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	17.09.2025
Zusatzinfo	14 photographs, 7 illustrations, 2 maps, index
Verlagsort	Lincoln
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
ISBN-10	1-4962-4460-5 / 1496244605
ISBN-13	978-1-4962-4460-4 / 9781496244604
Zustand	Neuware