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Sensing Willa Cather

Deploying the concepts and techniques of Body Studies, this book remaps Willa Cather’s writing from the 1890s through to 1940. This study of embodiment and narrative focuses on the senses and reads Cather as a writer at the transition from late Victorian to Modernist models 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. The book explores Cather’s ‘sensorium’ – her imaginative exploration of sounds, sights, tastes, smells and the tactile. Sensing Willa Cather draws on recent work in queer, disability, ageing and food studies to re-contextualize her fiction.
The first three chapters explore Cather’s writing in relationship to sense studies, and also such movements as Aestheticism and Modernism. The next five, roughly tracing the evolution of her career from an apprenticeship as a reviewer and journalist through to the established novelist, focus on the five senses. Sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell: each sense is successively linked to Cather’s work, and used to explore her profound interest in corporealism. The final chapter. ‘The Body of the Author’, then examines Cather’s last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, and Cather’s representation both of her own bodily presence and that of other writers.