Notes 1. Introduction 1. Willa Cather, Not Under Forty (London, 1936), p. v. The Nation, 117 (1923), 236-8. 2. Granville Hicks, 'The Case against Willa Cather' in English Journal, November 1933, reprinted in Willa Cather and her Critics, ed. James Schroeter (New York, 1967), pp. 139-47. Lionel Trilling, 'Willa Cather', New Republic 90 (1937), reprinted Schroeter, pp. 148-55. Harold Bloom, 'Introduction' to his collection, Modern Critical Views: Willa Cather (New York, 1985), pp. 1 and 3. 3. MS. letters to Kate Cleary (13 February 1905), to Carrie Sherwood (1 September 1922; 27 January 1934; 9 June 1943), Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Collection, Nebraska State Historical Society, Red Cloud, Nebraska (hereafter abbreviated as WCPM). The other letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher (15 March 1916) is in the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Collection, Bailey/Howe Library, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT (hereafter abbreviated as UVM). These letters are sum­ marised in Mark J. Madigan's valuable work, 'Letters from Willa Cather to Dorothy Canfield Fisher 1899-1947' (unpublished MA dis­ sertation, University of Vermont, 1987) - abstracts of letters from the Canfield Fisher papers. 4. Ernest Hemingway to Edmund Wilson, 25 November 1923, Selected Letters 1917-1961, ed. Carlos Baker (London, 1981), p. 105. 5. 'Willa Cather' in Schroeter, pp. 154-5. 6. Sacvan Bercovitch, 'The Problem of Ideology', Critical Inquiry 12 (1985-6), 631-53 (635-6). Allen Tate, 'Religion and the Old South', Essays of Four Decades (London, 1970), p. 568. 7. 'Problem of Ideology', 645. 8. Hicks, 'Case against', Schroeter, p. 147. 9. Other articles from this period which condemned Cather for evasion, nostalgia and the flight from modernity were as follows. Newton Arvin, 'Quebec, Nebraska, and Pittsburgh', New Republic 67 (12 August 1931), 345-6. Robert Cantwell, 'A Season's Run', New Republic 85 (11 December 1935), 149-53. Clifton Fadiman, 'Willa Cather: The Past Recaptured', Nation 135 (7 December 1932), 563-5. Even sympathetic readers understood Cather primarily as a nostal- gist: 'It is not realism that colors these volumes, it is youth seen through the golden haze of later years, in far exile. She has given us the Nebraska of the eighties and nineties as it lies rich and warmly lighted in her memory' commented Fred Lewis Pattee in his critical overview of The New American Literature 1890-1930 (1930. Reprinted New York, 1968), p. 264. 10. Willa Cather, On Writing, with a foreword by Stephen Tennant (New York, 1949. Reprinted 1968), pp. 23,27. 174 Notes 175 11. On Populism see Norman Pollack, The Populist Response to Industrial America: Midwestern Populist Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1962). 12. Pollack, p. 54 discusses Wealth Makers. Robert W. Cherny, 'Willa Cather and the Populists', Great Plains Quarterly 3 (1983), 206-18, argues that Cather's associations were with Nebraskans unsympa­ thetic to Populism. 13. Willa Cather, The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, 1893-1902, ed. William Curtin, 2 vols (Lincoln, 1970), pp. 308-13, 782-9. 14. The World and the Parish, p. 789. 15. When Cather came to revise The Song of the Lark she also turned away from political topicalities - in this case by cutting earlier references to Colorado politics. See Robin Heyeck and James Woodress, 'Willa Cather's Cuts and Revisions in The Song of the Lark', Modern Fiction Studies 25 (1979), 651-8. 16. Dorothy Canfield Fisher, 'Willa Cather: Daughter of the Frontier', New York Herald-Tribune (28 May 1933), sec. 2, pp. 7,9. 17. Robert M. Crunden, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization 1889-1920 (New York, 1982), p. ix. Peter Filene, 'An Obituary for "The Progressive Movement"', American Quarterly 22 (1970), 20-34 (31). 18. Benjamin De Witt, The Progressive Movement: A Non-partisan Comprehensive Discussion of Current Tendencies in American Politics (New York, 1915), pp. 4-5. 19. David W. Noble, 'The Religion of Progress in America, 1890-1914', Social Research 22 (1955), 417-40 (439). 20. 'In general they shared moral values and agreed that America needed a spiritual reformation to fulfill God's plan for democracy in the New World' writes Crunden in Ministers of Reform, p. ix. On the Social Gospel see J. A. Thompson, Progressivism, BAAS pamphlet (Durham, 1979), pp. 18-34. 21. J. A. Thompson, Progressivism, p. 12. Crunden, Ministers of Reform covers the broad intellectual context of progressivism including work in music and the visual arts. Jean B. Quandt, From the Small Town to the Great Community: The Social Thought of Progressive Intellectuals (New Brunswick, 1970) examines the communitarian Utopias of progressive thinkers such as Josiah Royce and John Dewey. 22. Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford, 1975). 23. For a valuable discussion of disillusion and idealism in the 1920s see Lawrence W. Levine, 'Progress and Nostalgia: The Self Image of the Nineteen Twenties', The American Novel and the Nineteen Twenties, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer (London, 1971) pp. 36-56. 24. Filene, 'An Obituary', discusses differing views on the nativism of the progressives. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, 1955), pp. 179-81 describes the progressive reaction against immigration. 25. Cather, 'Nebraska', 237. 26. Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London, 1985) provides a wealth 176 Notes of information to demonstrate Darwin's rapid fertilisation of the British fictional imagination. 27. Robert Clark, History, Ideology and Myth in American Fiction, 1823-52 (London, 1984), pp. 11-22. 28. Robert Weimann, 'Past Origins and Present Functions in American Literary History' in Structure and Society in Literary History (London, 1977), pp. 91, 115. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature (Chicago and London, 1987), p. 220. Warner Berthoff, 'Ambitious Scheme', Commentary 44, no. 4 (October, 1967), 111. Bruce Kuklick, 'Myth and Symbol in American Studies', American Quarterly 24 (1972), 435-50 ex­ haustively demolishes the theoretical assumptions of critics such as Leo Marx and Henry Nash Smith. I have used Clark's book as an example of historicised American studies but other works could have been cited. See especially Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York, 1983) and David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). A good recent account of American studies is Philip Fisher, 'American Literary and Cultural Studies since the Civil War' in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York, 1992), pp. 232-50. 29. Alvin Keman, The Death of Literature (New Haven, 1990), p. 70. Laura Brown, Alexander Pope (Oxford, 1985), p. 3. Alan Sinfield, 'Four Ways with a Reactionary Text', Literature Teaching Politics 2 (n.d.), 81-95 (81). Kiernan Ryan, Shakespeare (Hemel Hempstead, 1989), p. 10. 30. 'The Marriage of Phaedra' in The Troll Garden (1905), reprinted in Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction 1892-1912, ed. Virginia Faulkner, revised edition (Lincoln, 1970), pp. 219-34 (p. 229). Three other stories which illustrate Cather's prejudice are The Diamond Mine' and 'Scandal' (both in the 1920 collection, Youth and the Bright Medusa), and 'The Old Beauty', a 1936 story which appeared in the 1948 collec­ tion of the same name. 31. Sharon O' Brien, Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice (New York, 1987), pp. 239-40 deals with the marriage and the feelings it provoked in Cather. 32. James Schroeter, 'Willa Cather and The Professor's House', Yale Review 54 no. 4, reprinted in Willa Cather and her Critics, pp. 363-81 (p. 365). James Woodress, Willa Cather: A Literary Life (Lincoln, 1987), p. 284. O' Brien, Willa Cather, p. 240. The other biographical discussion of the topic is in Phyllis Robinson, Willa: The Life of Willa Cather (New York, 1983), pp. 48-9, 205-7. 33. Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London, 1988). 34. Heyeck and Woodress, 'Willa Cather's Cuts and Revisions'. 2. 'American Literature' and the Failure of American Culture 1. On the 'feminisation' of literary culture, the formation of the literary canon and the growth of American Studies in the universities, see: Notes 177 Paul Lauter, 'Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon: A Case Study from the Twenties', Feminist Studies vol. 9 no. 3 (1983), 435-63; Kermit Vanderbilt, American Literature and the Academy (Philadelphia, 1986); Richard Ruland, The Rediscovery of American Literature: Premises of Critical Taste, 1900-1940 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); Russell J. Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature (London, 1986). The two best accounts of Cather and the canon, from which I have learned a great deal, are: Deborah Carlin, 'Categorical Cather: Reading the Canon(s)', Cather, Canon, and the Politics of Reading (Amherst, 1992), pp. 3-26; and Sharon O' Brien, 'Becoming Noncanonical: The Case Against Willa Cather', American Quarterly 40 (1988), 110-26. 2. Henry C. Vedder, American Writers of To-day (New York, 1894), p. 3. 3. American Writers, p. 116. 4. Barrett Wendell, A Literary History of America (1900. London, 1901), p. 6. 5. Van Wyck Brooks, 'The Culture of Industrialism' (1917) and 'On Creating a Usable Past' (1918) in Critics of Culture, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New York, 1976), pp. 89-98 and pp. 165-71. 'Toward a National Culture' (1917) in Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years ed. Claire Sprague (New York, 1968), pp. 180-92. See also Ruland, Rediscovery, pp. 1-10. 6. Brooks, '"Highbrow"and "Lowbrow"' in Critics of Culture, p. 34. 7. Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years, p. 187. 8. 'The importance of The Ordeal of Mark Twain is that it is so typical of the literary criticism of its era.