Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux examines Willa Cather's position in time, in aesthetics, and in the world. Born a Victorian in 1873, Cather made herself a modernist through the poems, stories, and novels she wrote and published into the twentieth century. Beginning with a prologue locating Cather's position, this volume of Cather Studies offers three sets of related essays.
The first section takes up Cather's beginnings with her late nineteenth-century cultural influences. The second section explores a range of discernible direct connections with contemporary artists (Howard Pyle, Frederic Remington, and Ernest Blumenschein) and others who figured in the making of her texts. The third section focuses on The Song of the Lark, a novel that confirms Cather's shift westward and elaborates her emergent modernism. An epilogue by the editors of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather addresses how the recent availability of these letters has transformed Cather studies. Altogether, these essays detail Cather's shaping of the world of the early twentieth century and later into a singular modernism born of both inherited and newer cultural traditions.