Book Review: Willa Cather and Material Culture: Real-World Writing, Writing the Real World

Authors

Steven Trout, Fort Hays State UniversityFollow

Date of this Version

2005

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 25:4 (Fall 2005). Copyright © 2005 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Abstract

This tightly edited collection has two objectives: first, to underscore the importance of material objects in Cather's supposedly unfurnished fiction; second, to remind us of the material conditions under which her work - work that seems, at first sight, aloof from commercial consideration - was marketed and sold. Packed with original research (never before, for example, has anyone bothered to consider how much wealth Myra Henshaw's gold-stuffed "kit gloves" contain or to examine where Cather's name appears in advertising for the 1934 film version of A Lost Lady), the volume achieves both goals. Cather specialists and scholars interested in the American literary marketplace will find Willa Cather and Material Culture absorbing and rewarding.