Book Review: \u3ci\u3e Willa Cather\u27s Southern Connections: New Essays on Cather and the South\u3c/i\u3e

The cover of Willa Cather\u27s Southern Connections reproduces one square of what is Known as the Robinson-Cather quilt, an image that testifies to a communal-and female-artistic tradition in which Cather\u27s Back Creek, Virginia, kinswomen participated and with which her often heroic literary fictions seem to have little relation. Ann Romines participates in a quilting process of her own, piecing together seventeen revised essays from the seventh of a series of international conferences on Willa Cather held in 1997. Both conference and volume recontextualize a writer so often seen as Nebraskan or Western within a Southern matrix, asking Cather\u27s readers to view her in a web of Southern writers, dilemmas, and discourses so that we might begin to re-imagine our narratives about her career and her central texts. How, asks Judith Fetterley, might our official stories of Cather change as a result