Willa Cather and Aestheticism

Ann Moseley is William L. Mayo Professor and professor emerita of literature and language at Texas A&M University-Commerce. Sarah Cheney Watson is professor of English and Chair of the Department of Languages and Literature at East Texas Baptist University.

Perhaps because they believe that Cather's relation to the aesthetic movement has been an underdeveloped area of scholarship, Watson (East Texas Baptist Univ.) and Moseley (emer., Texas A & M, Commerce) have gathered essays that link the writer to a wide range of literary and visual artists—from figures such as the British Oscar Wilde and William Pater and Americans Henry James and Henry Adams to the fin de siècle dandy; from the Barbizon school, the tonalists, and the Arts and Crafts movement to modernisms. …The most satisfying essays articulate how Cather enacts the central dichotomy within aestheticism: that between the exquisite object or momentary perception of beauty and the "real" world of time, material production, and consumer capitalism. Peter Betjemann, for instance, traces similarities between the death of the engineer in Alexander's Bridge and the uprising of the laboring Morlocks in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, both of which enact a return of what is repressed in severing the aesthetic from the material. This volume provides the impetus for further explorations of the fascinating and vexing subject of Cather's aestheticism. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.