The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry by Keith Clark

Part III: Movement toward Modernism opens with Stout’s essay, which predominately disputes Porter’s “Refl ections on Willa Cather.” Stout uses Cather’s letters to retrace a few of her real— and some imagined— museum visits and her interests in specifi c painters to off er a thoughtful glimpse into Cather’s modernist aesthetic. Pater reappears in Olga Aksakalova’s “With the ‘Hand, Fastidious and Bold’: Bridging Walter Pater’s Aestheticism and Willa Cather’s Modernism” to augment her position that in Th e Professor’s House Cather “is comfortably looking backward, but going certainly forward.” “From British Aestheticism to American Modernism: Cather’s Transforming Vision,” by Jo Ann Middleton, closes this section by asserting that Cather’s eclectic reading experience informs her new aesthetic, one Middleton maintains is “a very American form of modernism.” Unfortunately, the volume ends with a single, muddled essay in Part IV: Art and Religion: John J. Murphy’s “Willa Cather’s Sheltering Art: Cather’s Cathedral and the Adams Factor,” which attempts to discuss Cather’s “Catholic Novels” against Henry Adams’s Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. Th is essay, much like Peter Betjemann’s and Jacqueline H. Harris’s, is both overwritten and unfocused. Th ese three essays excepted, Watson and Moseley compile a volume that delivers on its promise to “increase our understanding of Cather’s aesthetic beliefs and practices and contribute immensely to our critical understanding of her work and her life.” — Th eresa DeFrancis, Salem State University