The Sociohistorical Cather: Approaches to Race,War, and the Environment

I n his 1991 presidential address to the Modern Language Association, Mario J. Valdés remarked that “it is all too easy for the general public to accept the thesis that today's literary education has broken with its own tradition and now drift s in a sea of self-destruction” (428). In the 1980s and 1990s, politicians, television pundits, cultural critics, and even many literature professors found the field of literary study infiltrated by theoretical jargon and political agendas. For his part, Valdés argued for open-mindedness, reflecting that such public debates concerning what should be taught in the literary classroom represented a new opportunity for scholarly engagement with the public. In the midst of the culture wars of the 1990s, new approaches to Cather thrived. While critics of the 1930s through the 1950s viewed Cather as disengaged and apart from her cultural moment, the critics of the 1990s used new approaches to reveal a Cather very much engaged with the social and political ideas of her time. Additionally, sociohistorical critics examined how Cather’s fiction resonated with important issues from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including debates surrounding race and ethnicity, the United States as an imperial power in times of war, and environmental or conservation eff orts. One important tool in revealing the sociohistorical Cather was New Historicism, as many critics used nonfiction materials from Cather's lifetime as a way to illuminate how her fiction reflected, participated in, and deviated from cultural debates. New Historical and other sociohistorical readings of Cather's work flourished in the 1990s because of a confluence of forces. The publication of the Scholarly Editions of Cather's works, beginning with O Pioneers! in 1992, provided critics and scholars with reliable texts, historical materials, and publication history. International seminars dedicated to the study of Cather's work were offered routinely in the 1990s; the Cather Studies series offered scholars a means to share their work from these seminars on a regular basis. The volumes oft en invited critics to explore a particular avenue, like Cather's Canadian and Old World Connections ( Cather Studies 4 , 1999), Cather's Ecological Imagination ( Cather Studies 5, 2003), and History, Memory, and War ( Cather Studies 6, 2006).

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