by Susan Rosowski
University of Nebraska Press
Paperback

From the book jacket: The wide-ranging essays collected in this volume of Cather Studies examine Willa Cather's unique artistic relationship to the environment. Under the theoretical rubric of ecocriticism, these essays focus on Cather's close observations of the natural world and how the enviroment proves, for most of these contributors, to be more than simply a setting for her characters.

These essays reintroduce us to a Cather who is profoundly identified with the places that shaped her and that she wrote about: Glen A. Love offers an interdisciplinary reading of The Professor's House that is scientifically oriented; Joseph Urgo argues that My Antonia models a preservationist aesthetic in which landscape and memory are inextricably entangled; Thomas J. Lyon posits that Cather had a living sense of the biotic community and used nature as the standard of excellence for human endeavors; and Jan Groggons considers the ways that My Antonia shifts from nativism toward a "flexible notion of place-based community."

Susan J. Rosowski is Adele Hall Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the author of Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature (Nebraska 1997).