Willa Cather and Others

Jonathan Goldberg is Sir William Osler Professor of English at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the editor of Queering the Renaissance, also published by Duke University Press, and is the author of numerous other books, including Sodometries and Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples.

• Willa Cather and others; Cather diva; war requiems; strange brothers.

“Willa Cather and Others is an elegant book, the most sophisticated treatment yet of gender and sexuality in Cather’s work. In writing about the elusive beauty of Cather’s work, Goldberg manages to capture its beauty without losing the sense of elusiveness it creates.”-Michael Warner, author of The Trouble With Normal “Willa Cather and Others models queer criticism as a practice of patient intelligence and acuity. It elaborates beautifully ideas about the relation of the explicit to the inexplicit, of heterosexuality to the spaces, songs, glances, and objects of sexualities that go unnamed while resonating everywhere in Cather’s work.”-Lauren Berlant, author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City “In this elegantly written and passionate book, Jonathan Goldberg displays extraordinary attentiveness to the suggestive silences that open out beyond the surface of Cather's deceptively translucent prose. Refusing to use those silences to name too simply the very thing Cather herself insisted could not be named, Goldberg tracks the intricacies, twists, and crossings in the fabric of her writing to show how gender and sexuality almost always intersect in unpredictable and surprising ways. This is a moving, intelligent book.”-Jan Radway, author of A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle Class Desire