{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03359173126614987, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0017226528854435831, 'mean_word_length': 5.213903743315508, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Willa Cather: A Study of the Short Fiction by Loretta Wasserman (review)

This little monograph (previously unpublished work is within the first seventyfive pages) is the serious effort of an accomplished Cather critic with the good sense to look at the stories separately from the novels, be selective, and recognize that Cather has been denied the front ranks of American short story writers. Wasserman makes a case for Cather as modernist, noting that she read Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce, and Proust and was influenced by Henri Bergson's ideas on memory and time and William James' evolutionary vitalism. She argues that Cather's aesthetic of selectivity, emphasis on moments of epiphany, and experimentation establish her at the vanguard of twentieth-century artists. Cather's work, she notes, suffers like Frost's in being denied the modernist label because of a homespun dependence on things. However, in attempting to separate Cather from turn-of-the-century realistic writers, because she used things "to convey something about figures in the story, not to lend verisimilitude to a scene" (p. 13), Wasserman betrays Cather's own misunderstanding of realism.