"While probing the work of such well-known poets as Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Randall Jarrell, Janis P. Stout also highlights the impact of the World Wars on lesser studied but equally compelling sources, such as the music of Charles Ives, Cole Porter, Aaron Copeland, and Irving Berlin. She challenges the commonplace belief that war poetry came only from the battlefield and was written only by men examining the wartime writings of women poets...

"Starting with the pictured West that prevailed as Cather and Austin launched their careers, Stout shows how their work challenged and revised that masculine tradition. Rather than a West of violence and conquest, open only to rugged and daring men, Austin and Cather envisioned another West - not feminine so much as androgynous - a proving ground and space of freedom for women and men alike. Their vision of an alternative West and their alternative...

Katherine Anne Porter's life closely paralleled that of her century not only in its span (1890-1980) but in its interests and contradictions. A communist sympathizer who became a quasi fascist; a cosmopolitan who embraced southern agrarianism, a femme fatale whose writings nonetheless evince feminist feeling, Porter embodied, often at their extremes, the major currents of her time and ours. In this new biography, Janis P. Stout argues that these inconsistencies...

"Willa Cather and Material Culture is a collection of 11 new essays that taps into a recent and resurgent interest among Cather scholars in addressing her work and her career through the lens of cultural studies. One of the volume's primary purposes is to correct the commonplace view of her as a literary connoisseur set apart from her times and to demonstrate the extent to which Cather did participate in her culture. The contributors explore both...