Editing Willa Cather (section)

==Literary style and reception==
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Although Cather began her writing career as a journalist, she made a distinction between journalism, which she saw as being primarily informative, and literature, which she saw as an art form.{{r|Middleton|page=27}} Cather's work is often marked by—and criticized for<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Ozieblo |first1=Barbara |title=Love and Disappointment: Gamel Woolsey's unpublished novel Patterns on the Sand |journal=Powys Notes |year=2002 |volume=14 |issue=1–2 |pages=5–12}}</ref>—its nostalgic tone<ref name="affect"/><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Morgenstern |first1=Naomi E. |title=Love Is Home-Sickness": Nostalgia and Lesbian Desire in "Sapphira and the Slave Girl |journal=Novel: A Forum on Fiction |year=1996 |volume=29 |issue=2 |pages=184–205 |doi=10.2307/1345858 |jstor=1345858 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/1345858 |issn=0029-5132}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Morley |first1=Catherine |title=Crossing the water: Willa Cather and the transatlantic imaginary |journal=European Journal of American Culture |date=July 1, 2009 |volume=28 |issue=2 |pages=125–140 |doi=10.1386/ejac.28.2.125_1}}</ref> and themes drawn from memories of her early years on the American plains.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Rosowski |first1=Susan J. |title=Willa Cather's Ecology of Place |journal=Western American Literature |year=1995 |volume=30 |issue=1 |pages=37–51 |doi=10.1353/wal.1995.0050|s2cid=165923896 }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Fischer |first1=Mike |title=Pastoralism and its Discontents: Willa Cather and the Burden of Imperialism |journal=Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature |year=1990 |volume=23 |issue=1 |pages=31–44 |jstor=24780573 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/24780573 |issn=0027-1276}}</ref> Consequently, a sense of place is integral to her work: notions of land,<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Ramirez |first1=Karen E. |title=Narrative Mappings of the Land as Space and Place in Willa Cather's O Pioneers! |journal=Great Plains Quarterly |date=Spring 2010 |volume=30 |issue=2}}</ref> the frontier,{{efn-ua|Between 1891 and Cather's publication of ''The Song of the Lark'', there was a paucity of novels dealing with farm life. By the 1920s, however, literary interest in rural life and the frontier grew considerably.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Dennis |first1=Ryan |title=Naming Fields: The Loss of Narrative in Farming |journal=New England Review |date=December 17, 2020 |volume=41 |issue=4 |pages=126–134 |doi=10.1353/ner.2020.0123 |s2cid=229355389 |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/775697 |language=en |issn=2161-9131}}</ref>}} pioneering and relationships with western landscapes are recurrent.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Keller |first1=Julia |title=The town Willa Cather couldn't leave behind |work=The Anniston Star |date=September 7, 2002 |page=10}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Walker |first1=Don D. |title=The Western Humanism of Willa Cather |journal=Western American Literature |year=1966 |volume=1 |issue=2 |pages=75–90 |doi=10.1353/wal.1966.0004 |s2cid=165885366 |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/528582/summary |language=en |issn=1948-7142}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Brown |first1=E. K. |title=Willa Cather and the West |journal=University of Toronto Quarterly |year=1936 |volume=5 |issue=4 |pages=544–566 |doi=10.3138/utq.5.4.544 |s2cid=161220902 |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/549805/summary |language=en |issn=1712-5278}}</ref> Even when her heroines were placed in an urban environment, the influence of place was critical, and the way that power was displayed through room layout and furniture is evident in her novels like ''My Mortal Enemy''.<ref>{{cite book |last=Winters |first=Laura |title=Willa Cather: Landscape and Exile |location=Selinsgrove |publisher=Susquehanna University Press |year=1993| isbn=978-0-9456-3656-4| page=58}}</ref> Though she hardly confined herself to writing exclusively about the Midwest, Cather is virtually inseparable from the Midwestern identity that she actively cultivated (even though she was not a "native" Midwesterner).<ref>{{Cite web|title=Writing Willa Cather|url=https://www.clereviewofbooks.com/home/melissa-j-homestead-daryl-w-palmer-willa-cacther-review-gano|access-date=December 21, 2021|website=Cleveland Review of Books|language=en-US}}</ref> While Cather is said to have significantly altered her literary approach in each of her novels,<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Stouck |first1=David |title=Hagiographical Style in Death Comes for the Archbishop |journal=University of Toronto Quarterly |year=1972 |volume=41 |issue=4 |pages=293–307 |doi=10.3138/utq.41.4.293 |s2cid=162317290 |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/559878/summary |language=en |issn=1712-5278}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Curtin |first1=William M. |title=Willa Cather: Individualism and Style |journal=Colby Quarterly |year=1968 |volume=8 |issue=2 |pages=35–55}}</ref> this stance is not universal; some critics have charged Cather with being out of touch with her times and failing to use more experimental techniques in her writing, such as [[stream of consciousness (narrative mode)|stream of consciousness]].{{r|Middleton|page=36}}<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Homestead |first1=Melissa |last2=Reynolds |first2=Guy |editor1-last=Rosowski |editor1-first=Susan J. |title=Introduction |journal=Cather Studies |date=October 1, 2011 |volume=9 |page=x |doi=10.2307/j.ctt1df4gfg.4}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Skaggs |first1=Merrill Maguire |title=Willa Cather's Experimental Southern Novel |journal=The Mississippi Quarterly |year=1981 |volume=35 |issue=1 |pages=3–14 |jstor=26474933 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/26474933 |issn=0026-637X}}</ref> At the same time, others have sought to place Cather alongside modernists by either pointing to the extreme effects of her apparently simple [[Romanticism]]<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Gingrich |first1=Brian |title=Willa Cather's Naivete |journal=Twentieth-Century Literature |date=September 17, 2020 |volume=66 |issue=3 |pages=305–332 |doi=10.1215/0041462X-8646863 |s2cid=225334904 |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/764995 |language=en |issn=2325-8101}}</ref> or acknowledging her own "middle ground":

<blockquote>She had formed and matured her ideas on art before she wrote a novel. She had no more reason to follow [[Gertrude Stein]] and [[James Joyce]], whose work she respected, than they did to follow her. Her style solves the problems in which she was interested. She wanted to stand midway between the journalists whose omniscient objectivity accumulate more fact than any character could notice and the psychological novelist whose use of subjective point of view stories distorts objective reality. She developed her theory on a middle ground, selecting facts from experience on the basis of feeling and then presenting the experience in a lucid, objective style.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Curtin |first1=William M. |title=Willa Cather: Individualism and Style |journal=Colby Library Quarterly |volume=8 |issue=2 |pages=1–21 |url=https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1911&context=cq|date=June 1968}}</ref></blockquote>

The English novelist [[A. S. Byatt]] has written that with each work Cather reinvented the novel form to investigate the changes in the human condition over time.<ref name="Byatt">{{cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/dec/09/fiction.asbyatt|title=American pastoral|date= December 8, 2006|access-date=January 23, 2014|first=A. S.|last=Byatt|author-link=A. S. Byatt|newspaper=The Guardian}}</ref> Particularly in her frontier novels, Cather wrote of both the beauty and terror of life.<ref name="Acocella" /> Like the exiled characters of Henry James, an author who had a significant influence on the author,<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Reynolds |first1=Guy |title=Willa Cather as Equivocal Icon |journal=Presentations, Talks, and Seminar Papers – Department of English |date=June 2003 |page=5 |url=https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishtalks/2}}</ref> most of Cather's major characters live as exiled immigrants,<ref name="Acocella">{{cite book |last1=Acocella |first1=Joan Ross |title=Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism |date=2000 |publisher=University of Nebraska Press |isbn=978-0-803-21046-2 |pages=5–6}}</ref> identifying with the immigrants' "sense of homelessness and exile" following her own feelings of exile living on the frontier. It is through their engagement with their environment that they gain their community.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Urgo |first1=Joseph R. |title=Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration |date=1995 |publisher=University of Illinois Press |isbn=978-0-252-06481-4 |pages=17, 88}}</ref> [[Susan J. Rosowski]] wrote that Cather was perhaps the first to grant immigrants a respectable position in American literature.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Rosowski |first1=Susan J. |title=The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism |date=2001 |publisher=University of Nebraska Press |isbn=978-0-803-28986-4 |page=45}}</ref>