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).
[...] 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.
*Modern Fiction Studies*
This book reveals Cather as "most sensuous of writers." From her
first story, "Peter," about a disabled, displaced violinist, to her
last novel, populated by enslaving and enslaved bodies, she focuses
on "bodies in transition" to whom the five senses are crucial.
Drawing from recent work in queer, disability, aging and food
studies, Reynolds gives us fresh, revelatory readings, especially
of Cather's last three novels, each of which explores a major theme
in U.S. culture--"colony, performance, race"--through close
attention to bodies. An indispensable, engrossing, and
transformative book!
*Ann Romines, The George Washington University*
In his insightful new study, Sensing Willa Cather, Guy Reynolds
offers nothing short of a revelatory new way to encounter Cather’s
work. Her richly nuanced scapes—their visual details, their
tapestries of sounds and tastes and smells and tactilities—are
explored here with prodigious care and originality. This marvelous
book opens up the entire sensorium of Cather’s world both to new
readers and those who have read her deeply yet are open to
pondering avenues that lead to an even richer understanding of this
quintessential American writer.
*Bradford Morrow, author of The Prague Sonata and The Forger’s
Daughter*
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