Sensing Willa Cather

Guy J. Reynolds is Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The former General Editor of both the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition and Cather Studies, he is also the author and editor of several books including Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire (St. Martin’s, 1996) and Apostles of Modernity: American Writers in the Age of Development (U of Nebraska Press, 2008).

• AcknowledgementsList of Abbreviations1. Willa Cather in the Realm of the Senses2. Cather’s Bodily Art and the Emergence of Modernism3. ‘Sense-dwarfed’: Cather, Aestheticism and a new corporealism4. Pale Shades and Living Colors: Cather’s looks5. Sound Affects: Music, Voice, and Silence in The Song of the Lark, My Mortal Enemy, and Lucy Gayheart6. Touch: haptic narrative in The Professor’s House, Shadows on the Rock, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl7. Cather, taste, and national cuisines: The Professor’s House, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Shadows on the Rock8. Cather’s smellscapes: perfumes and flowers; disgust and seduction9. Conclusion: the body of the authorBibliographyIndex

[...] this is a rich, complexly conceived interpretive project—though it is a book that itself reads, and reads Cather, with a deft and approachable lucidity. Sensing Willa Cather is one of those rare critical works that is interesting both for what it has to say about its subject and for how it goes about its intellectual enterprise. [...] Reynolds has given us a new conception of Cather’s writing, one that already seems as necessary as it is novel.