5 - Cather in the Literary Marketplace: Authorial Criticism, Archival Studies, and Book-Historical Criticism

Summary

The text” has been, since the introduction of New Criticism in the early twentieth century, at the heart of literary interpretation. While feminist and historical approaches encouraged the reading of texts in relation to their social or cultural moment, the field of book history asks us to examine texts as books. In Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (published in English in 1997, in French in 1987) Gérard Genette noted that a text “is rarely presented in an unadorned state” (1). Readers note features, including “an author's name, a title, a preface, illustrations”; while Genette acknowledged that we may debate whether such features are truly part of the text, he argued that it would not exist without these features. “To indicate what is at stake,” Genette suggested, “we can ask one simple question as an example: limited to the text alone and without a guiding set of directions, how would we read [James] Joyce's Ulysses if it were not entitled Ulysses?” (2).

One of the most enduring lines within the critical conversation on Willa Cather seeks to position her as artist, drawing our attention to issues of aesthetics and form in her fiction; even Cather's harshest critics generally acknowledged her well-wrought craftsmanship. In the late 1980s, the critical conversations began to consider Cather as a professional in the literary marketplace. In contrast to earlier biographical studies of Cather that focused on documenting the movements of her life, Cather critics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries became interested in authorial criticism, which sought to examine Cather's authorial persona. These critics asked questions like, What sort of author did Cather seek to be? To what degree does her authorial identity reflect her knowledge of the literary marketplace? How did she craft this authorial identity through her correspondence and book production? These questions led naturally to book-historical studies of Cather's work, which found that Cather was engaged in all aspects of production, including editing, book design, and marketing. Previously, many critics situated Cather's firm sense of aesthetics in opposition to more crass motivations, like market appeal.