"This book began in 1997 with the seventh in the ongoing series of International Willa Cather Seminars, held for the first time in Cather's birthplace, Frederick County, Virginia ... a selection of the best of those papers has become this book"--Acknowledgements.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Willa Cather spent her first nine years in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where her family had lived for five generations. Even after the Cathers' move to Nebraska, she came of age in an emphatically southern extended family, surrounded by Virginia stories, customs, and controversies. Throughout her career, Cather's fiction drew strength from the people, places, and issues of the Reconstruction South of her birth, culminating in her final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl. This collection of essays is the first to look at this important southern connection in Cather's writing life. Ann Romines has brought together eminent Cather critics and fresh new voices discussing topics as diverse as the racial language of Cather's landscapes, the sexual dynamics and abolitionist concerns represented in Sapphira, and Cather's youthful experiments with clothes and gender. Grounded both in traditional literary criticisms and in cultural studies, these sixteen essays make a compelling claim for the importance of Cather's southern connections." -- back cover.

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