The Cambridge Companion to Willa Gather ed. by Marilee Lindemann, and Willa Cather and Material Culture: Real-World Writing, Writing the Real World ed. by Janis P. Stout

Abstract

4 6 2 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e W in t e r 2 0 0 7 and perspectives that inhabit these changing western spaces. Tara Penry speaks to the use ofsentiment to eulogize and energize in her chapter on “Sentimental Eco-Memoir” that examines the cultural work of Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge (1992) and William Kittredge’s Hole in the Sky (1992). Penry includes both Tom Lyon’sconcern with “loss of space, quietness and wildness” and Ray Gonzalez’s alarm at El Paso’s “rapid urban decay” and “disappearing deserts” (342). The capacious range of diverse texts within Western Subjects, coupled with interdisciplinary perspectives from an impressive array of scholars, mirrors the cacophony ofpostmodern conversation held daily in these Wests. In these places, lifewriters and scholars conduct their productive, contentious, forwardlooking , backward-glancing debates. The Cambridge Companion to W illa Gather. Edited by Marilee Lindemann. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 229 pages, $65.00/$24-99. W illa Cather and Material Culture: ReaUWorld Writing, Writing the Real World. Edited by Janis P. Stout. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. 240 pages, $37.50. Reviewed by Evelyn I. Funda Utah State University, Logan The mark of an important writer is that his or her work responds well to an evolving variety of critical approaches, and Willa Cather’s fiction, over the last decades, has been made fresh again and again by scholars studying her in terms ofgender, regionalism, modernism, politics, and soon. The two collected editions presently under review suggest that approaching Cather from material culture and cultural studies perspectives can be equally profitable. To demonstrate, as has Janis Stout’ s collection, that concrete objects in Cather’sfiction “are both ingredients and traces ofhuman identity, human his­ tory, and human culture” or to posit, as does Marilee Lindemann’scollection, that Cather was “an acute observerofAmerican life whose deeplyfelt responses to changing social and demographic conditions are illuminating both for what they celebrate and for what they evade or repress” suggests new frontiers for Cather studies, even ones that challenge Cathers own statements about her work (1, 3). After all, wasn’t it Cather herself who claimed in her essay “The Novel Demeuble ” that the novel needed to be “defumished” of all the things that tended to muddle up the scenery; wasn’t it Cather who suffered the taunt of “escapist” because, as she had written in “Escapism,” she was committed to the idea that it was not the duty of the writer or artist to directly address the social ills of a nation, for to do so would only turn them into propagandists? Yet without directly contradicting Cather’s stated beliefs, the writers in these two volumes manage to prove, indeed, how evocative and rich material objects BO O K R E VIE W S 4 6 3 and cultural contexts are within Cather’swritings and to showhow teasing out these threads proves Cather was a writer fully participating in her culture and its intellectual framework. The eleven writers in Stout’sWilla Cather and Material Culture consider a fascinating variety of items. They point out, for instance, that the Cather family quilts from Virginia symbolically replicate the central tensions of Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), or they trace the extent of young Cather’s efforts as the managing editor of The Home Monthly to carry out or challenge the magazine’scommercial and editorial goals in its efforts to commodify man­ ners among a rising middle class. Other contributors outline Cather’sfight to maintain control of her literary reputation amidst the film industry’s filming and packaging of novels like A Lost Lady (1923) or read The Professor's House (1925) as “an ambivalent response to the recognition that in the twentieth century, nature is material culture: not virgin territory, but a set of social dis­ courses and practices, including images and advertisements, roads and railways, scientific documents and National Park Service policies, tourist facilities and museum exhibits” (125) or propose that a desert juniper tree or a silver bell in a church tower, as well as other...