Willa Cather’s Canadian and Old World Connections ed. by Robert Thacker, Michael A. Peterman, and: Willa Cather’s Southern Connections: New Essays on Cather and the South ed. by Ann Romines

BOOK REVIEW S 1 8 5 Willa Cather's Canadian and Old World Connections. Edited by Robert Thacker and Michael A. Peterman. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. 342 pages, $30.00. Willa Cather's Southern Connections: New Essays on Cather and the South. Edited by A nn Romines. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. 240 pages, S I8.50. Reviewed by Elizabeth A . Turner William Rainey Harper College, Palatine, Illinois Every two to three years an International Willa Cather Seminar is held at a location that was important to Cather. The sixth seminar was held in Quebec City in 1995, the setting of her late novel Shadows on the Rock, and in 1997 the seventh seminar was held in Frederick County, Virginia, where Cather lived until she was nine. From these seminars have come two important anthologies: Willa Cather's Canadian and Old World Connections, edited by Robert Thacker and Michael A. Peterman, and Willa Cather's Southern Connections: New Essays on Cather and the South, edited by Ann Romines. The editors of these collections served as program directors for their respective seminars. Published as the fourth volume in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Cather Studies Series, Willa Cather's Canadian and Old World Connections brings together eighteen essays, many of which were originally presented at the Quebec seminar. Each essay supports one central theme: "the intellectual and cultural inheritances of Europe meeting the 'great fact' of the settlement of the New World, whether in Quebec, Nebraska, New Mexico, or Virginia" (4). Therefore, this collection focuses not only on Cather's Canadian work, Shadows on the Rock, but also upon other texts that consider the idea of settlement, a well-recognized theme in western American literature. The first essay, David Stouck's " 'Willa Cather's Canada': The Border as Fiction," is an appropriate introduction that considers "what it meant for Cather to cross a national bound­ ary" (7). Stouck describes Cather's visits to Canada, notes references to Canada in her fiction, and includes a review of critics who have examined Cather's interest in Canada. Stouck asserts that Cather was attracted to Canada's "older political order and a way of life less marked by the modernism and materialism of twentieth-century American culture" (18). He suggests that Cather may have come "to view Canada as an alternate American tradition" (13). The essays that follow aren't organized topically; however, one might approach them by examining which of Cather's works each focuses on. As expected, several of the essays take Cather's Shadows on the Rock as their topic, among them Richard Millington's "Where is Quebec? Anthropological Modernism in Shadows on the Rock." Millington argues, among other things, that Cather's "love for place and her interest in the past came to intellectual and artistic fruition as an interest in culture" (23). Other critics find "old world 1 8 6 WAL 3 6 . 2 S U M M E R 2 0 0 1 connections" in Cather's The Professor's House. In "Youth and Age in the Old and New Worlds: Willa Cather and A. E. Housman," Elsa Nettles makes such a connection, noting Cather's interest in Housman as well as parallels between The Professor's House and A Shropshire Lad. In "Bringing Outland Inland in The Professor's House: Willa Cather's Domestication of Empire," Deborah Karush suggests that Tom Outland is a kind of frontiersman who is a part of a "rever­ sion to the mythology of continental expansion" (147). Several other essays focus on Death Comes for the Archbishop. Deborah Lindsay Williams's " Losing Nothing, Comprehending Everything: Learning to Read Both the Old World and the New in Death Comes for the Archbishop" proposes that "the mesalike structure of the novel incorporates Old World and New and finds the Old World in the New" (83). The other essays in this anthology are, likewise, concerned with the topic of the Old in the New World. Individual essays examine Alexander's Bridge, One of Ours, and some of the short stories, and several take on multiple texts. Françoise Palleau-Papin has written a convincing essay, "The Hidden French in Willa Cather...

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