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Index- Fall 1984

Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly- Fall 1984

Index (8 Pages)

Review Of Willa Cather: A Bibliography By Joan Crane, Susan J. Rosowski

Great Plains Quarterly

In Willa Cather: A Bibliography, Joan Crane has surpassed our fondest hopes for a bibliography that would establish and describe the Cather canon. This is a volume that will be invaluable to collectors and booksellers, textual critics, and literary scholars.

By following rigorous standards of analytical description, Crane provides the specialized information that booksellers, private persons, and librarians need to collect and preserve Cather's printed writing. Ordinarily, the needs of the collector, who focuses on physical characteristics, seem different from those of the literary scholar, who focuses on content. But this separation is neither so easy nor so clear …

Willa Cather Today, James E. Miller Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly

From 1947, the year Willa Cather died, until today, Cather studies have expanded from a Nebraska cottage craft to an international industry. During this time the number of publications about her life and work has become formidable. Recently I made an assault on the ever taller mountain of Cather material, and although I have not reached the peak, I have spent considerable time slogging up some treacherous slopes. What I present here is a bundle of my own biases, selective in nature, without any pretense of comprehensiveness. I would like first to take a brief look at three works on …

Nebraska Naturalism In Jamesian Frames, John J. Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly

So much has been written about Willa Cather and the influence of the classics and later European literature that one sometimes forgets the American literary climate in which she developed. It was a postromantic age of realism, epitomized by William Dean Howells's attempt to limit fiction to normal characters in commonplace situations, which would make of it, as Cather complained, a "sort of young lady's illusion preserver." But the new breed of "naturalists," Cather's contemporaries, were in revolt against Howells and his more accomplished contemporary, Henry James, and advocated a return to romance without the chivalric trappings of Walter Scott …

Willa Cather And The Swedes, Mona Pers

Great Plains Quarterly

Willa Cather's immigrant characters, almost a literary anomaly at the time she created them, earned her widespread critical and popular acclaim, not least in the Scandinavian countries, a market she was already eager to explore at the beginning of her literary career. Sweden, the first Scandinavian country to "discover" her books, issued more translations of Cather fiction than any other European country. In fact, Sweden was ten years ahead of any other Scandinavian country in publishing the translation of a Cather novel (see table). This article will investigate the publication and reception of Willa Cather's books in Sweden, compare that …

Light And Shadow In The Cather World A Personal Essay, Lucia Woods

Great Plains Quarterly

I want to explore with you my feelings about the polarity of light and shadow in Willa Cather's world and in my own experience as illuminated by that world. Carl Jung said, "Evil needs to be pondered just as much as good, for good and evil are ultimately nothing but ideal extensions and abstractions of doing, and both belong to the chiaroscuro of life. In the last resort there is no good that cannot produce evil and no evil that cannot produce good."

I won't take on evil as much as the deeper greys. I became more aware of them …

Review Of Willa: The Life Of Willa Cather By Phyllis C. Robinson, John J. Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly

"I dwell in possibility," one of Emily Dickinson's memorable fIrst lines, would be an appropriate epigraph for this biographical study, which titilates the reader with suppositions about Cather's attachments to other women. For example, Louise Pound was an early "infatuation" for two years, until Cather attacked brother Roscoe Pound because "he must have hurt her in a way she could not forgive .... Had he found himself attracted to her and been rebuffed? Had he lashed out and bullied her for preferring his sister to himself? Perhaps he made fun of her attachment to Louise? Perhaps he did more than …

Review Of Labyrinths Of Voice: Conversations With Robert Kroetsch By Shirley Neuman And Robert Wilson, George E. Wolf

Great Plains Quarterly

Some years ago, in an interview with fellow praine writer Margaret Laurence, Robert Kroetsch remarked, "You and I, because we are western Canadians, are involved in making a new literature out of a new experience." Kroetsch's published works (seven novels, a volume of collected poems, a book on Alberta, and a host of stories, critical essays, and interviews) are now a vital part of this new literature, and anyone interested in the life of the imagination in prairie Canada must read and savor-and sometimes contend with-Robert Kroetsch.

It is good, therefore, to have Labyrinths of Voice available in the Western …

Willa Cather's American Gothic Sapphira And The Slave Girl, Susan J. Rosowski

Great Plains Quarterly

Willa Cather's plains novels provide the lens through which readers approach her canon. Starting with O Pioneers!, My Àntonia, A Lost Lady, and the other Nebraska novels, critics have identified her major themes (the noble pioneer, the frontier, the creative imagination) and described her development (generally some version of an initial optimism over the frontier period followed by an elegiac lament for the pioneer past). From such a viewpoint, Cather's last book, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, seems an aberration, which, if treated at all, is seen as an escape into a pre-Civil War southern setting, remote …

Notes & News- Fall 1984

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes and News

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Review Of Conversations With Wallace Stegner On Western History And Literature By Wallace Stegner And Richard W. Etulain, Kenneth C. Mason

Great Plains Quarterly

Any new book by Wallace Stegner is a cause for celebration among students of the fiction and history of the American West, and this collection of ten interviews, conducted by Richard W. Etulain in 1980 and 1981, is an event of signal importance to all admirers of Stegner's work. The interviews begin with biographical clarifications, treat the fiction next (with separate chapters on The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Angle of Repose), and then turn to the Mormons, western literature, western history, and the western wilderness, with a concluding miscellaneous chapter.

The transcripts of the interviews were revised only …

Review Of Mari Sandoz: Story Catcher Of The Plains By Helen Winter Stauffer, Robert Gish

Great Plains Quarterly

Invariably the name of Mari Sandoz is associated with the Great Plains and more particularly with Nebraska. As Helen Winter Stauffer's comprehensive biography, Mari Sandoz: Story Catcher of the Plains, makes clear, such an association had both its advantages and disadvantages in Sandoz's life and in her career as a writer. Like other authors who for better or worse come to be known as regional, Sandoz had to reconcile knowing her home intimately and being inspired by the "spirit" of that place with the need to transcend and universalize her home and her life stories through the very form …

Review Of Rodeo: An Anthropologist Looks At The Wild And The Tame By Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence, John W. Bennett

Great Plains Quarterly

Anthropologists have been slow to take up intensive fieldwork in American life, partly because their professional training has emphasized that "the exotic" is something found only in remote tribal societies, not in urbanized North America. But with the transformation of tribal cultures into developing nations, anthropologists have begun to turn to their own culture and have found it possible to see it as exotic. This book is an example of that new genre. The author has unusual equipment for the task: she was trained as a veterinarian and also as an anthropologist, and her study of rodeo grew out of …

Review Of The Cattle Guard By James F. Hoy, R. Douglas Hurt

Great Plains Quarterly

For anyone who has traveled the back roads and trails of the range country in the Great Plains, the cattle guard is a familiar and welcome sight. It is an open gate that enables cars and trucks to pass through a fence but prevents livestock from getting out of pastures. Although many styles exist, the cattle guard essentially is a pipe, bar, or wooden grid laid over an open pit or trench. The bars are spaced so that livestock will not walk on them for fear their hooves will slip through. No one can say when the first cattle guard …

Review Of Many Tender Ties: Women In Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870 By Sylvia Van Kirk, Olive Patricia Dickason

Great Plains Quarterly

The bittersweet story of women in the fur trade of the Canadian Northwest has been a long time in the telling. According to standard historical interpretations, trading furs was an exclusively male domain; related activity, particularly if it involved women, was seen as peripheral, and often as libertine. As Sylvia Van Kirk makes clear, however, that is a one-sided view at best; the previously dismissed social aspect of the fur trade was far more important than has generally been assumed.

The Hudson's Bay Company did its official best to prevent alliances from developing between its men and Amerindian women. This …

Review Of Plains Indian Studies: A Collection Of Essays In Honor Of John C. Ewers And Waldo R. Wedel Edited By Douglas H. Ubelaker And Herman J. Viola, Warren W. Caldwell

Great Plains Quarterly

A dual Festschrift is unusual, but here we have one celebrating a collective century of achievement by John Ewers and Waldo Wedel, two scholars of the first rank. Ewers and Wedel, long-time colleagues at the Smithsonian Institution, are well known to historians and anthropologists with special interests in the plains of North America. Indeed, each has contributed to the basic structure of their respective disciplines: Ewers essentially to ethnology and Wedel to archeology. Neither scholar worked within a strictly academic setting and thus, neither had students in the usual sense, yet Ewers and Wedel have been remarkably influential and are …

Review Of A Bibliographical Guide To The Study Of Western American Literature By Richard W. Etulain, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly

As Richard Etulain states in his preface, this is a comprehensive but not exhaustive bibliography of books, dissertations, and articles about western American literature. The bulk of the volume lists materials on more than 350 major western authors, including some major historians and nonfiction writers, but perhaps the most significant part of the book is the section dealing with seven important aspects of the field that suggest ways of arranging research to go beyond individual works and authors to overviews and generalizations.

Etulain's categories are: (1) local color and regionalism, (2) popular western literaturedime novels and the Western, (3) western …

Review Of Prairie Mosaic: An Ethnic Atlas Of Rural North Dakota By William C. Sherman, Robert C. Ostergren

Great Plains Quarterly

Ethnic atlases appeal to the general public because they graphically verify long suspected or perceived patterns of local or regional cultural differentiation. They are useful to academia because the geographic pattern portrayed is a variable that is basic to a wide variety of scholarly inquiries. Unfortunately, good ethnic atlases are few in number because compiling the data necessary to accurately describe ethnic patterns at an appropriate scale is a difficult and time-consuming task that few are willing to undertake. Those who have the patience to do this kind of work deserve our admiration and thanks.

This atlas is the work …

Review Of The Thunderstorm In Human Affairs Edited By Edwin Kessler, Alec H. Paul

Great Plains Quarterly

This magnificent book is copiously endowed with figures and photographs, with generous pages of eight and one-half by eleven inches. The book is organized and written in such a way that the interested layperson, the meteorology student, and the thunderstorm researcher will all benefit from it. The list of authors reads like an American "who's who" of specialists in the field of thunderstorms.

The book is a project of the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, and it has much to interest residents of the Great Plains although its geographic scope encompasses the entire United States. Kessler has produced …

Review Of Inventing Billy The Kid: Visions Of The Outlaw In America, 1881-1981 By Stephen Tatum, Kent L. Steckmesser

Great Plains Quarterly

Here is a sophisticated study of an individual who is both a "timeless conventional outlaw and a timely invented outlaw." Tatum traces the changes in the images of Billy the Kid over one century, relating them to concurrent social and cultural circumstances. The historical William H. Bonney is accorded one chapter, but the book's main concern is the multitude of interpreters who have created their own versions of his life in works ranging from dime novels and biographies to ballets and films.

Initially, between 1881 and 1900, the Kid's biography was formulated as a "romance." As a "bad" badman, a …

Review Of Plains Families: Exploring Sociology Through Social History By Scott G. Mcnall And Sally Allen Mcnall, J. Allen Williams

Great Plains Quarterly

Scott and Sally McNall, of the University of Kansas, provide a new and interesting way to teach sociology. Plains Families uses the social history of the Great Plains region of the United States from the 1860s to the present to demonstrate how abstract sociological ideas and concepts are grounded in reality.

A variety of source materials (e.g., letters, diaries, interviews) are used by the authors to construct composite case histories of families. The presentation of each case is followed by a chapter designed to illustrate a major dimension of sociology. The illustration, in turn, affords the reader a much better …

Title And Contents- Summer 1984

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

SUMMER 1984 VOL. 4 NO.3

CONTENTS

THE PRAIRIE MERMAID: LOVE-TESTS OF PIONEER WOMEN Robert H. Solomon

MAPPING THE INTERIOR PLAINS OF RUPERT'S LAND BY THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY TO 1870 Richard I. Ruggles

THE IMAGE OF THE HIRED GIRL IN LITERATURE: THE GREAT PLAINS, 1860 TO WORLD WAR I Sylvia Lea Sallquist

BOOK REVIEWS

Red Harvest: The Communist Party and American Farmers

Interwoven: A Pioneer Chronicle

Lambshead Before Interwoven: A Texas Range Chronicle, 1848-1878

Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800-1915

Montana's Righteous Hangmen: The Vigilantes in Action

Belle Starr and Her Times: The Literature, the Facts …

Review Of Red Harvest: The Communist Party And American Farmers By Lowell K. Dyson, Robert W. Cherny

Great Plains Quarterly

By surveying Communist efforts to organize farmers and farm workers, Lowell K. Dyson has done for agriculture what Bert Cochran did for the CIO in Labor and Communism-presented a full account of Communist activities uncolored by Red-baiting or apologies. Dyson begins by noting the paradox in Communist efforts: "Communists sought to change the very nature of the American agricultural system, but the programs which won them the broadest hearing among farmers were aimed at preserving the system" (p. xi). Maintaining an even-handed objectivity, Dyson nonetheless conveys a sympathetic understanding of how some farmers came to espouse radicalism.

In the …

Review Of Westering Women And The Frontier Experience, 1800-1915 By Sandra L. Myres, John Mack Faragher

Great Plains Quarterly

When Professor Myres began the research for this survey of women in the American West, many historians believed that there were few manuscript collections documenting the experiences of nineteenth-century women, "Such is not the case," Myres concludes. Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800- 1915, the first volume of the Histories of the American Frontier Series devoted to the history of women, treats us to what the late Ray Allen Billington called "one of the most remarkable bibliographies to materials in this new area." Myres summarizes her extensive reading in these documents in topical chapters: western women's views of …

Review Of The American Farmer And The New Deal By Theodore Saloutos, David E. Hamilton

Great Plains Quarterly

This posthumously published study by Theodore Saloutos is an important addition to the burgeoning number of works on New Deal farm programs. The subject is enormous. Saloutos focuses on the Agricultural Adjustment Administration's efforts to curtail production and to enact marketing agreements, the struggle to broaden farm relief to include both black and white farmers on the bottom half of the rural economic and social scale, the fight to bring electricity to rural America, Henry Wallace's quest to open up the clogged system of international trade, and the programs to rescue the farmers and ranchers of the Great Plains from …

Review Of Southwestern Agriculture: Pre-Columbian To Modern Edited By Henry C. Dethloff And Irwin M. May, Jr., Mary W.M. Hargreaves

Great Plains Quarterly

This volume, a collection of the papers presented at an Agricultural History Symposium held at Texas A&M University in May 1980, brings together the work of twenty-six discussants on a wide variety of topics designed to illumine the Southwest as "a distinctive region, neither south nor west, but a cultural amalgam that is greater than the sum of its parts" (p. 1). Like most symposia, the Texas sessions provided an assemblage of papers uneven in both the subjects covered and the quality of research.

Major gaps in the survey of southwestern agriculture are evident in the absence of studies of …

Review Of Shadows Of The Indian: Stereotypes In American Culture By Raymond William Stedman, Paul H. Hutton

Great Plains Quarterly

Raymond William Stedman approaches the pervasive stereotyping of American Indians with the awe of the devotee of popular culture who was raised on stories of noble warriors and animalistic savages, but also with the outrage of a modern humanist who hopes to reveal and discredit demeaning images. This leads to an interesting dichotomy in the book as the author presents endless examples of insulting-but sometimes entertaining-Indian images from histories, novels, plays, films, and television. After more than two hundred pages of insulting, humorous, and sometimes wonderfully lascivious material, Stedman delivers a twentypage sermon on the evils of such material and …

Notes And News- Summer 1984

Great Plains Quarterly

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Review Of Belle Starr And Her Times: The Literature, The Facts And The Legends By Glenn Shirley, Darlis A. Miller

Great Plains Quarterly

Glenn Shirley, whose extensive writings on outlaws and lawmen include Heck Thomas, Shotgun for Hire, Temple Houston, and West of Hell's Fringe, informs us that more than one hundred books and pamphlets have been published describing the exploits of Belle Starr, "the most maligned and written-about woman in America." Shirley wants to set the record straight, believing that Belle Starr deserves vindication. "My purpose," he states, "is to provide at least one comparison of contemporary reports and official records with the folklore and legends."

For aficionados of the outlaw-West, Belle Starr and Her Times will make intriguing reading. Like …

Review Of Interwoven: A Pioneer Chronicle By Sallie Reynolds Matthews & Lambshead Before Interwoven: A Texas Range Chronicle, 1848-1878 By Frances Mayhugh Holden, Sandra L. Myres

Great Plains Quarterly

Written as a memoir for her grandchildren, Sallie Reynolds Matthews's Interwoven was first printed in 1936 and reissued in 1958 in a handsomely designed edition by Texas's famous printer and designer Carl Hertzog with illustrations by E. M. (Buck) Schiwetz. As the reputation of the Matthews book grew, copies became harder and harder to find, and both the 1936 and 1958 editions are now rare and expensive. Happily this 1982 volume is an exact duplication of the 1958 Hertzog edition.

Born in 1861 in Stephens County, Texas, Sallie Reynolds grew up on the edge of the Great Plains, a harsh, …