Review of \u3ci\u3eRedefining the American Dream: The Novels of Willa Cather\u3c/i\u3e By Sally Peltier Harvey

Harvey\u27s book will be of interest not only to Cather scholars, but to an audience more widely concerned with literature as an expression of culture. By citing some of Cather\u27s contemporaries (Andrew Carnegie\u27s exegesis of the Gospel of Wealth and William James\u27s identification of success as the country\u27s bitch-goddess, for instance) as well as her literary peers (Howells, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck among them), then complementing this with more recent cultural studies of the early twentieth century (such as Jackson Lears\u27s examination of intellectual transformation and Warren Sussman\u27s study of the changing perceptions of the individual), Harvey gives us a solid framework for understanding Cather\u27s personal redefinition of the American Dream within a wider cultural and intellectual context