Sensing Willa Cather

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.

“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.”

[...] 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.--Richard H. Millington, Smith College "Modern Fiction Studies"
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

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).

A radical reinterpretation of Willa Cather's oeuvreDeploying 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.

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