Review of Redefining the American Dream: The Novels of Willa Cather By Sally Peltier Harvey

Authors

Evelyn I. Funda, Utah State University

Date of this Version

1995

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 15:4 (Fall 1995). Copyright © 1995 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Abstract

Harvey's book will be of interest not only to Cather scholars, but to an audience more widely concerned with literature as an expression of culture. By citing some of Cather's contemporaries (Andrew Carnegie's exegesis of the "Gospel of Wealth" and William James's identification of success as the country's "bitch-goddess," for instance) as well as her literary peers (Howells, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck among them), then complementing this with more recent cultural studies of the early twentieth century (such as Jackson Lears's examination of intellectual transformation and Warren Sussman's study of the changing perceptions of the individual), Harvey gives us a solid framework for understanding Cather's personal redefinition of the American Dream within a wider cultural and intellectual context.