Cather, Willa - Joan Acocella (Essay Date 2000)
JOAN ACOCELLA (ESSAY DATE 2000)
SOURCE: Acocella, Joan. "Cather and the Feminists: The Problem." In Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, pp. 37-43. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.
In the following essay, Acocella discusses the difficulty that Cather's apparent ambivalence about women causes for feminist critics attempting to analyze her work.
An important job for feminist literary critics in the 1970s and 1980s was to assemble a "female canon," a list of first-rate woman-authored books that would demonstrate that women were the equal of men as writers and therefore that their underrepresentation in the approved catalog of great literature—and in allied enterprises, such as publishing and the universities—was the result of politics, not biology. Cather was of course necessary to such a list. But the feminists didn't just need first-rate writers; they...
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