Willa Cather and Aestheticism [Hardcover]

Perhaps because they believe that Cather's relation to the aesthetic movement has been an underdeveloped area of scholarship, Watson (East Texas Baptist Univ.) and Moseley (emer., Texas A & M, Commerce) have gathered essays that link the writer to a wide range of literary and visual artistsfrom figures such as the British Oscar Wilde and William Pater and Americans Henry James and Henry Adams to the fin de si?cle dandy; from the Barbizon school, the tonalists, and the Arts and Crafts movement to modernisms. &The most satisfying essays articulate how Cather enacts the central dichotomy within aestheticism: that between the exquisite object or momentary perception of beauty and the real world of time, material production, and consumer capitalism. Peter Betjemann, for instance, traces similarities between the death of the engineer in Alexander's Bridge and the uprising of the laboring Morlocks in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, both of which enact a return of what is repressed in severing the aesthetic from the material. This volume provides the impetus for further explorations of the fascinating and vexing subject of Cather's aestheticism. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.A gorgeous, hard-bound book that lives up to its title, Willa Cather and Aesthecism is a pleasure to handle and to read. A glossy image of Lady Lilith painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti adorns the rich red-and-black cover. Inside, readers find a diverse yet cohesive grouping of essays on the subject of Willa Cathers relationship to the Aesthetic Movement. This collection challenges commonly received assumptions about Cathers artistic influences, revisiting well-known texts through a new lens and exploring more deeply many of Cathers works that have received less critical attention. The authors engage a wide range of approaches, focusing on everything from painting to architecture to material objects in establishing their claims about Cather and aestheticism. .l#¾