Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux/Something Complete and Great: The Centennial Study of My Ántonia

By no means a typical academic essay, the piece is written as a dialogue (with alternating sections attributed to one author or the other) and provides genuine insight into the difficult and critical decisions that scholarly editors must often make, including but not limited to the complexities of interpreting an author's wishes more than sixty years after her death. According to Blackford, however, its presence in this volume signals "an unspoken transhumanist lens" to the essays by showing how "Cather breaks down boundaries between human and nature/land, male and female, past and present, masculine and feminine desire" (10). [...]all three essays from the collection's first section (by Janis P. Stout, Caterina Bernardini, and Diane Prenatt) are particularly strong, as is Melissa J. Homestead's analysis of Cather's 1926 revisions to the introduction of My Ántonia. [...]it means exploring not only the archival materials present in various collections but also questioning the absences: materials considered at one time too trivial to save, items lost or destroyed, and ideas left unexpressed or stifled.