Wharton and Cather

Eighteen articles and four book chapters on a wide range of topics this year attest to Wharton's depth and versatility. Critics discuss her as a realist, a modernist, a writer of historical fiction, and an interpreter and reviser of sentimentality. They analyze diverse novels, including The Valley of Decision, The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, Summer, The Age of Innocence, Twilight Sleep, and The Children. Her short fiction also receives abundant attention, with work on The Touchstone, "Bunner Sisters," Old New York, and "The Other Two." The fiction is open to a variety of approaches, with treatments of gender and manners as well as explorations of Wharton as a critic of consumer culture, in relation to publication history, and in the context of travel and war. Change and ambivalence are frequent themes. Theorists informing the analyses include Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Jean Baudrillard, and Theodor Adorno.

Cather scholarship in 2015 is distinguished by its sheer quantity and range—some 50 articles and chapters, though no monographs—and by its tendency to view Cather in relation to other authors. This comparative trend is anchored in the 10th volume of Cather Studies, which expands and delineates the map of Cather's 19th-century roots, demonstrating that the influences of Henry James, W. D. Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, and A. E. Housman, among others, are significantly more complicated than previously recognized. At the same time, scholars continue to enumerate the multiple ways Cather can be considered a modernist: her revisions of precursors, her affinities with contemporaries, her themes and contexts, the company she kept. Modernist interpreters, as always, have a soft spot for the sphinxlike Godfrey St. Peter of The Professor's House. But in an unexpected populist revolt against elites, common readers express antimodernist sentiments in Charles Johanningsmeier's analysis of Cather's fan mail, the year's most compelling and timely essay. This was a watershed year for study of Cather's penultimate novel, Lucy Gayheart, which appears in the Nebraska Scholarly Edition with a definitive historical essay by David Porter and is the subject of an important reinterpretation by Richard H. Millington. Porter's research signals a renewed interest in musical approaches to Cather, evident also in the 2012 scholarly edition of The Song of the Lark and in Samuel R. Delany's essay on A Lost Lady and Richard Wagner's Parsifal reviewed here. Some new scholarship (Melissa J. Homestead's essay on the Cather-Edith Lewis relationship and Chung-Hao Ku's on "Paul's Case") seems to be rethinking conventional queer approaches to Cather and her work. The Willa Cather Newsletter and Review published two special issues that offer contrasting images of the author: the indigenous ecologist and the transatlantic sophisticate. Cather scholarship breathes more freely since the publication of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (see AmLS 2013, p. 137), bringing new texture and immediacy to all critical perspectives.

The Wharton section of the chapter is contributed by Carol J. Singley and the Cather section by Joseph C. Murphy.

i Edith Wharton

In "'The Great Panorama': Edith Wharton as Historical Novelist" (MLR 110: 69–84) Janet Beer and Avril Horner argue that Wharton, like George Eliot, whom she admired, is a writer of history who offers domestic detail as well as a grand national narrative of sweeping events. Reading The Valley of Decision, a novel at the beginning of Wharton's career, alongside The Age of Innocence, they note in Wharton's depictions of Fulvia Vivaldi and Ellen Olenska a capacity to portray intelligent, independent women who exert forces for good. In Wharton's rendering of political and economic corruption, they find parallels between 18th-century Italy and late-19th-century America, with Odo Valsecca and Newland Archer paralyzed by conflict between tribal traditions and new social forms. Both novels, they persuasively write, document the desirability and inevitability of change and the constraining roles of masculinity and femininity in societies on the brink of upheaval. The Valley of Decision is thus "a crucial step" in Wharton's development as a...