Canonical Relations: Willa Cather, America, and The Professor's House

Abstract

The first of these observations, both made by James Schroeter in his introduction to the Recent Views section of Willa Cather and her Critics, published in 1967, could still pass as majority opinion. Those critics who do work on Cather routinely lament their own, and Cather 's, continued exclusion from the main currents of American literature as measured by canon-forming syllabi, anthologies, or magisterial pronouncements of American literary greatness. However, there now is a Willa Cather industry. This is evidenced on the one hand by the fact that, great or not, Cather is in a continual condition of reappropriation at the hands of readers of various persuasions, and on the other by the luxuriant growth of Catherland, the real and imaginary location centered around Red Cloud, Nebraska, where devoted Catherites go to immerse themselves in theme park versions of the immigrant pioneer dream. That there is now no contradiction between industrial levels of criti-