Autorentext

Melissa J. Homestead is a professor of English and program faculty in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She is the author of The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis and American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822–1869 and the coeditor of Cather Studies, Volume 9: Willa Cather and Modern Cultures (Nebraska, 2011), among other books.

Klappentext

Although it has long been claimed that Willa Cather destroyed most of her letters in order to protect her privacy, the record now makes clear that this is largely myth: The Complete Letters of Willa Cather digital archive has collected more than three thousand letters, and more are regularly being located. What can we learn about Cather and her fiction from such a wealth of firsthand writings? The essays in Cather Studies, Volume 15 use a variety of approaches to consider both letters authored by Cather and letters written to her, shining new light on Cather's relationships with her brother Roscoe Cather and her friends playwright and screenwriter Zoë Akins and opera diva Olive Fremstad.

Readers also come to understand Cather's pleasure in artistic works produced by others, her experience of disability, and her appreciation of the GIs who read her books in Armed Services Editions. Contributors show how digital tools can be used to read across her letters at a larger scale, finding patterns and trends not discernible using conventional methods.

Inhalt

List of Illustrations
Introduction
Melissa J. Homestead

1. “Near and Not Too Near”: Celebrity Fandom and Queer Affinity in the Friendship between Willa Cather and Zoë Akins
   Sara Bryant
2. A View Beyond The Song of the Lark: The Letters from Olive Fremstad to Willa Cather and Cather’s Opera Diva Stories
   Jessica Tebo
3. “My Dear Boy”: Roscoe Cather’s Role within Willa Cather’s Kingdom of Art
   Laurie A. Weber
4. The “Very Especial Pleasure” of Home Places: Four Letters by Willa Cather to Other Artists
   John H. Flannigan
5. “Something Out of Even This Hand-in-a-Box”: Reading Disability in the New Complete Willa Cather Letters Digital Scholarly Edition
   Elizabeth Wells
6. Willa Cather, G.I. Fan Letters, and the Armed Services Editions during the Second World War
   Mary Chinery
7. Patterns and Outliers among People, Dates, and Places in Cather’s Correspondence
   Gabi Kirilloff, Matthew Lavin, and Sean McCullough
   Notes on Contributors