Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture
Regular price
€33.99
14 days return policy
Shipping & Delivery
A01=Julie Olin-Ammentorp
American Literature
American Novelist
Author_Julie Olin-Ammentorp
Category=DS
Category=JBSF1
Death Comes for the Archbishop
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Ethan Frome
Literary Aristocrat
Literary Criticism
Literary Fiction
My Antonia
O Pioneers
Prairie Populist
The Age of Innocence
The House of Mirth
Women Authors
Product details
- ISBN 9781496244604
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Nov 2025
- Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Edith Wharton and Willa Cather wrote many of the most enduring American novels from the first half of the twentieth century, including Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence, and Cather’s O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. Yet despite their perennial popularity and their status as major American novelists, Wharton (1862–1937) and Cather (1873–1947) have rarely been studied together. Indeed, Wharton is seen as “our literary aristocrat,” an author who chronicles the lives of the East Coast, Europe-bound elite, while Cather is considered a prairie populist who describes the lives of rugged Western pioneers. But these depictions neglect the striking and important ways the works of these two authors intersect.
The first comparative study of Wharton and Cather in more than thirty years, this book reveals Wharton’s and Cather’s parallel experiences of dislocation, their relationship to each other as writers, and the profound similarities in their theories of fiction. Julie Olin-Ammentorp explores the importance of literary and geographic place in their lives and works, including the role of New York City, the American West, France, and travel. In doing so she reveals the two authors’ shared concern about the culture of place and the place of culture in the United States.
The first comparative study of Wharton and Cather in more than thirty years, this book reveals Wharton’s and Cather’s parallel experiences of dislocation, their relationship to each other as writers, and the profound similarities in their theories of fiction. Julie Olin-Ammentorp explores the importance of literary and geographic place in their lives and works, including the role of New York City, the American West, France, and travel. In doing so she reveals the two authors’ shared concern about the culture of place and the place of culture in the United States.
Julie Olin-Ammentorp is a professor emerita of English at Le Moyne College (Syracuse, New York). She is the author of Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War, editor of the Oxford World’s Classic edition of Wharton’s novel A Son at the Front, and a former member of the Board of Governors of the Willa Cather Foundation. She lives in Minnesota.
