Sensing Willa Cather: The Writer and the Body in Transition

A radical reinterpretation of Willa Cather's oeuvre

Deploying the concepts and techniques of Body Studies, Guy J. Reynolds remaps Cather's vast and diverse range of writing from the 1890s through to 1940. His study of embodiment and narrative focuses on the senses and reads Cather as a writer at the transition from late Victorian to Modernist modes of representation. The book presents suggestive new ways of understanding her depictions of disability, male bodies and Native American culture, not to mention her narratives of whiteness and of the black body.

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).