Violence, the Arts, and Willa Cather

From her childhood explorations with vivisection through her adult sense that human life was characterized by cyclical encounters with death and disaster, Willa Cather was devoted to making art in the face of violence. Twenty-three critics contribute to the fullest explication to date of Cather, violence, and the arts, exploring thematic representations of violence in war, suicide, sexual trauma, shame, and rage as well as aesthetic responses to violence through literary choreographies and encounters with kind and unkind things. In this volume, Willa Cather emerges as a resource for survival in an age of terror, an artist who encourages her readers to feel at home in the nexus of creativity and terror, and to seek creative responses to the horror of human life. According to the critics gathered here, Cather's aesthetic is built upon surfaces below which are violent and deadly depths, and about which her best lives attempt to soar.