Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1995
Abstract
There are moments when Carlin simply gives the novels to much credit for the value of their ambivalence, especially when concluding her chapters: on more than one occasion her final claim seems to be that Cather's late work was simply too complex and metafictional for earlier critics. Moreover, her feminism is more nuanced than her deconstructive technique: although extremely attentive to the complicated ways in which white women make use of black women in Sapphira and the Slave Girl, for instance, Carlin valorizes the way characters in Shadows on the Rock tell small stories in the midst of the novel's larger flow as if this shift in registers by itself powerfully blurs the line between history and fiction. Most often, though, Carlin's particular blend of feminist and deconstructive reading leads to excellent analysis, engaged analysis-and ultimately to one of the most acute books of Cather criticism available.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 15:1 (Winter 1995). Copyright © 1995 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.