Book review: Cather Among the Moderns, by Janis P. Stout; Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture, by Julie Olin-Ammentorp,

Janis  Stout’s  Cather  Among  the  Moderns  and  Julie  Olin-Ammentorp’s  Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture each offers a consider-able  contribution  to  Willa  Cather  studies  and  indeed  to  Edith  Wharton  studies  in  the  case  of  the  latter.  Both  books  demonstrate  exemplary  scholarship in their blending of close literary analysis with historical and biographical  insights.  Stout  and  Olin-Ammentorp  break  new  ground  in  the  critical  conceptualisation  of  Cather  in  particular.  Interestingly,  both  books approach their subjects as being deeply attuned to the cultures they occupied and deeply cognizant of the sociopolitical debates that they are often  perceived  as  overlooking  in  favor  of  narratives  of  either  ordinary  midwesterners  or  New  York  upper-class  elites.  As  well  as  this  sense  of  the  writers  as  culturally  and  politically  engaged,  both  Stout  and  Olin-Ammentorp offer portraits of the writers as carefully attentive to the craft and  form  of  writing  itself.  Cather,  in  particular,  is  presented  by  Stout  as  a modernist in a similar vein to Virginia Woolf in terms of her attention to  the  formal  gaps  and  elisions  (rather  wonderfully  described  by  Stout  as  “vacuoles” [AUTHOR: Please include a page number for this quotation]), the shape of her texts, and her compulsive revision of them, as well as her deviation  from  standard  generic  expectations  and  parameters  as  closely  aligned to the modernist project of “making it new.”