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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | VIOLENCE, THE ARTS, AND WILLA CATHER
ISBN# 9780838641576
Reviewed by: Karsten H. Piep
Great Plains Quarterly, Spring 2009 |
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This compilation of twenty-three essays proves that contemporary scholarship has moved beyond trite debates about Cather's alleged propensity to romanticize violence. Accordingly, the volume's editors have assembeled a series of nuanced readings that reconsider Willa Cather's artistic uses of violence as well as her appropriations of various art forms before the backdrop of World War I, modernist aesthetics, Nativism, and 1920s feminism. Approaching their subject through the lenses of biographical, historical, aesthetic, psychoanalytical, and gender criticism, the contributors paint Cather as a sometimes generous, sometimes severe critic of American culture, whose insistence on the inescapability of violence is attended by a heightened awareness of the preciousness of life. Joseph R. Urgo makes this point explicitlyin his introduction, arguing that Cather's works embody an "existential terror" and "display the ways in which intimate knowledge of sudden death may enrich our lives."
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