Pulitzer Prize-winning short-story writer Katherine Anne Porter once wrote that she liked Willa Cather's short fiction better than any of her novels. More than fifty years later, Porter's opinion runs counter to critical consensus, as Cather is mainly known for her twelve novels published between 1912 and 1940. Her long fiction, which she intended to be her enduring literary legacy, should not, however, obscure her achievement as a short-story writer. Her fiction-writing career began with a short story in 1892 and ended with one over fifty years later. In all, she published sixty-two stories, some of which rank among her most accomplished fiction of any length.

My interest in the comic Cather began with a question at a plenary session of an international seminar. “Does Willa Cather have any sense of humor at all?” After a long silence, someone gamely replied that she must have, though at the moment he couldn't think of an example. The question remained with me, initially alerting me to the one-liners in Cather's writing and eventually taking me to the most basic questions about her art and its relation to life. Art begins in feeling seeking form, Cather believed, anticipating the philosopher Susanne Langer's argument that feelings arise from premises about life that are so fundamental that they are structural. Does one celebrate the uniqueness of an individual asserting himself, or herself, against the world? If so, tragedy provides the form. Or does one celebrate life's continuities, blurring distinctions between the self and the not-self in order to do so? Such a feeling finds an outlet in comedy.

Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), Willa Cather's last novel, is the first to be set in her birthplace, the Shenandoah Valley of northern Virginia. In 1936, just before she began work on this new book, Cather wrote an enthusiastic and reflective essay in response to two of Thomas Mann's biblical novels, based on Old Testament narratives. She praised Mann's skill in “making a new story out of an old one which is a very part of the readers' consciousness,”and concluded, “What we most love is not bizarre invention, but to have the old story brought home to us closer than ever before, enriched by all that the right man could draw from it and, by sympathetic insight, put into it.”This essay appeared in Not Under Forty, a collection that Cather proclaimed was intended for “the backward,” readers “over forty” whose gaze was turned toward the past. Cather herself was now in her early sixties, entering the last decade of a career that had been marked by invention. Each of her eleven novels had posed a fresh set of challenges. As Cather turned to the writing of Sapphira, she confronted at last her own quintessential “old story”: the Virginia of her family history and early childhood.

Willa Cather had little use for critics, preferring to have ordinary readers find and encounter her books without the mediating lens of the professional interpreter. Critics have, from time to time, returned the favor, consigning her to near-oblivion in the 1930s when they judged her to be out of touch with the painful social and economic realities of Depression-era America. Today, fortunately, her reputation with both lay and professional readers is secure, for she is widely read (the prestigious Library of America has two Cather volumes in its series, and My Ántonia has been reprinted in the Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century series), regularly taught (in a range of undergraduate and graduate courses in American literature, women's literature, and lesbian/gay/queer studies), and the subject of intense critical scrutiny and controversy. Those controversies have in recent years landed Cather on the cover of such influential middle-brow publications as The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where tabloid-style headlines demand to know “What have the academics done to Willa Cather?” or proclaim “Justice for Willa Cather,” as if the long-dead writer has been a hostage or a political prisoner who has finally gained her freedom.

Readers of Willa Cather's fiction are well aware that many of her most interesting and memorable characters are performing artists. Probably Thea Kronborg, of The Song of the Lark, comes most immediately to mind, but there are many others, some familiar and some not. Even well-informed readers of Cather's novels and stories may not realize, however, the extent of her own familiarity with the performing arts and how much her development of these performing-artist characters rests on direct experience. Cather was in fact intensely devoted to music and theatre throughout her life, and wrote numerous theatre reviews and critical columns about the performing arts during her twenty or more years as a journalist. After she became associated with the successful and influential magazine McClure's, she also wrote informative articles about performing artists, thereby adding to her expertise. The knowledge she accumulated, as well as her personal passion for the theatre and music, contributed importantly to the development of her artistic principles and goals, her conception of herself as an artist, and even her conception of gender - as well as to the success of her stories and novels that involve performers and performances.

Cather was a writer who emerged at a transitional moment in the evolution of American culture, and the complexity of her work results from her responses to this shifting historical matrix. Born in 1873, she was an American of the late-Victorian period, and she lived her early life in the relatively provincial backwater of rural Nebraska. But it would be a patronizing mistake to see this historical and geographical context as inevitably quiet or conservative or politically insignificant. This was a time of considerable political ferment, a ferment that was formative in shaping her fiction's social and political dimensions. After the settlement of the prairies and their initial cultivation by American and European pioneers, the later years of the nineteenth century were lean. The 1890s, when Cather was a student in Lincoln and then a fledgling journalist, were a decade of agricultural crisis. Crop failures, drought, and depopulation (as the prairie schooners continued to move westwards, beyond such states as Kansas and Nebraska) heralded a crisis. Then the Panic of 1893, when a London financial firm abruptly crashed, saw British investors pull their money out of the United States, precipitating a three-year depression (and, as we shall see, directly affecting Nebraskans whom Cather knew). The rise in unemployment and strikes was eerily premonitory of the 1930s, and the crisis touched Cather's state too. In 1895 the power company in her hometown of Red Cloud failed; “the town had no electricity for ten years.” The decade taught Nebraskans tough lessons about a globalizing economy, about failure as well as success.

The study of the significance of Cather's sexuality for her writing was decisively launched by Sharon O'Brien in a 1984 essay; subsequent work in this area takes O'Brien's 1987 biography of Cather as a benchmark, a necessary point of departure. In “'The Thing Not Named': Willa Cather as a Lesbian Writer,” O'Brien linked the topics I address here - the question of Cather's artistic practices; the question of her sexuality - in the phrase she highlights from Cather's programmatic 1922 essay, “The Novel Démeublé.” “The thing not named” names the love that dare not speak its name, the crime not to be named among Christians. For O'Brien, Cather's self-recognition as a lesbian was inscribed under this prohibition (O'Brien found evidence for this self-understanding in an 1892 letter of Cather's to Louise Pound). “Cather did not fully or uncritically internalize the emotionally crippling definition of lesbianism as 'sick' or 'perverse' and challenged the social construction of female friendship as unnatural. And yet simultaneously she could not help accepting it” (p. 81). Out of this ambivalence, O'Brien argued, Cather fashioned gender-ambivalent characters (as she had early named herself William Cather, MD; she signed the letter to Pound “William”), displaced same-sex desire into luscious descriptions of feminized landscapes, and eventually molded strong women characters who, however, never were coupled with other women.

Although writers choose from a variety of settings and circumstances for their novels, few writers venture into religious arenas in which they have little direct experience. Cather, whose family had been Baptists in Virginia, was no Catholic, although she joined the Episcopal Church on December 27, 1922, the same year when, she famously wrote in Not Under Forty, “the world broke in two.” When she began writing Death Comes for the Archbishop, she wanted to create a novel that reflected both her profound visual appreciation for the Southwest, which she had visited many times in her lifetime, and her respect for the contributions of the Catholic Church in that region and throughout America. That she admired the rich cultural and artistic traditions of the Church, as well as the devotion of its nineteenth-century missionary clergy, is evident in her novel. The work was inspired by a little known biography Cather discovered in 1925 while she was visiting Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Life of the Right Reverend Joseph P. Machebeuf, written by Father William Howlett and published in 1908, provided the writer with her novel's heroes: Jean Latour and Joseph Vaillant are closely based on the real-life Archbishop Lamy and his vicar-general Machebeuf.

Two years ago, while spending a sabbatical in California, I decided to reread Willa Cather's letters to Zoë Akins, collected at the Huntington Library. As Cather scholars have long known, doing biographical research on Cather is a challenging task: her letters are scattered in collections all over the country, and no Collected Letters of Willa Cather exists because of the provision in her will banning publication. Now we have the invaluable A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather (2002) edited by Janis Stout, but this useful summary and chronology of Cather's correspondence is no substitute for reading the original documents. Some libraries interpret her will liberally and will either allow you to make Xerox copies or will send you copies. The Huntington policy, however, is to adhere strictly to the terms of the will. No photocopies.

The following analysis of The Professor's House addresses an old critical debate over the relation of Willa Cather's art to her society's realities, to the actual world experienced by her readers. In the 1930s she quarreled with the critic Granville Hicks, who had liked her early prairie novels for their “authentic” and “realistic” pictures of the hardships of midwestern pioneer and immigrant life, but deplored the later works - particularly Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock - as glamorous pseudohistories, escapist fantasies to comfort “readers who share her unwillingness to face the harshness of our world.” Hicks understood Cather's escapism as a moral flaw and abdication of social responsibility; other readers have seen it as an aesthetic triumph. Cather herself, in a famous response to Hicks, acknowledged it proudly as a simple necessity: “What has art ever been but escape?”

Though Hardy's Jude the Obscure and Cather's My Ántonia begin with boyhood - Jude is eleven, Jim ten - neither book is remotely for young people. Both writers focus upon the tension between youthful idealism and the less highly colored vision of middle age; both also accord the latter's pragmatism more novelistic interest than the former's energy. Each author explores the gap between what we expect of the world and what we obtain from it, only to close by assuming the impossibility of ever making these ideas equivalences. “Nobody did come, because nobody does”: this is a striking tack away from the high-spirited inventiveness that characterizes so much of fiction-writing, where, of course, the novelist may direct anyone at all to rescue, enlighten, or waylay the protagonist.

One can find a complete bibliography of Durkheim's own works and coverage of the secondary literature published before 1973, in Steven Lukes, Émile Durkheim: His Life and Work. This listing should be considered an update. We cover not only Durkheim's major works available in English, but also a selection of important recent articles and books on Durkheim. We have limited ourselves to writings which have as their primary objective the explication or critique of Durkheim's thinking. Obviously, a massive quantity of important material developing, illustrating, inspired by or applying Durkheim's ideas has been published over the years. This has not been included here. Readers will be able to locate this literature as needed through study of the chapters in this volume, each of which includes citation of relevant material.

Durkheim was very fond of three-part schemas, perhaps due to his training at the École Normale Superieure and in philosophy. His three great works The Division of Labor (1893), Suicide (1897) and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) are each composed of three “books” (setting aside The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), a methodological manifesto, first published in article form). The influence of this ternary rhetoric can be perceived right at the heart of his scientific work. Thus in his first major book, Durkheim identifies three abnormal forms of the division of labor; similarly in Suicide, he distinguishes three types of suicide. But this is only an illusion. In both cases Durkheim presents three types but, if one reads properly, he describes four. Beneath the appearance of a triangle there is a square, and this square is logically necessary to Durkheim's reasoning and the coherence of his analysis. These two squares, one for abnormal forms of the division of labor, the other for types of suicide, will be briefly reviewed before returning to the thorny question of their possible relationships.

Mapping the field

Beginnings are notoriously difficult to define: what we have in literature are continuities and breaks with the past. Did the “Boom” of the Latin American novel begin in 1958, when Carlos Fuentes (b. 1928) published his innovative, multilayered exploration of Mexico City in the 1940s and 1950s, La región más transparente (Where the Air is Clear)? Or in 1962, when Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936) won the Biblioteca Breve Prize (offered by the Spanish publishers Seix Barral) for his manuscript Los impostores (“The impostors”), that would later be re-titled La ciudad y los perros (Time of the Hero)? Or in 1963, when Julio Cortázar (1914-84) published Rayuela (Hopscotch), his extraordinary Baedeker of the new? Or in 1967, when Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1928) brought out Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), initiating a worldwide interest in magical realism? Whatever inaugural date different critics might propose, this chapter deals with developments from the late fifties to the early seventies.

Two different political projects helped to modernize and radicalize the political and cultural climate: the Cuban Revolution and the rhetoric and realities of what economists at the time called “developmentalism.” We should not, with over forty years of hindsight and in a very different political climate, underestimate the achievements and also the hope offered by the Cuban Revolution. It was held by most at the time in Latin America to be an exemplary nationalist and anti-imperialist movement that seemed to demand an intellectual and practical commitment and offered the utopian promise of uniting the artistic and political vanguards.

The development of the Brazilian novel is inseparable from ethnic and geographic considerations. The Brazilian nation grew from the interaction and miscegenation of European, indigenous, and African populations in five distinct regions according to an enduring paradigm which has informed political and cultural discussions: the Northeast, originally a plantation society like the US “South,” and a privileged storehouse of living traditions; the socioeconomically dominant Southeast, including the states of Rio and São Paulo and Minas Gerais; the predominantly indigenous North (essentially, the Amazon basin); the South, where settlement was principally European; and the frontier lands of the Center-West, less populated and relatively peripheral to national power. After Brazilian independence from Portugal in 1822, Rio de Janeiro quickly developed a European-style bourgeois cultural life, including numerous newspapers, in which most nineteenth-century novels were initially published in serial.

Joaquim Manuel de Macedo’s A moreninha (“The little brunette,” 1844) was perhaps the first successful novel in Brazil and inaugurates a recurrent nineteenth-century theme: a romantic relationship between idealistic young people in spite of cruelties of social fortune. The first notable work of realism focusing on the urban lower-middle class is Manuel Antônio de Almeida’s Memórias de um sargento de milícias (“Memoirs of a constable,” 1854), which presents a series of picaresque but touching scenes, and evokes the transformation of a town into a city with suggestive nostalgia. Romantic and realist modes both flourished through the late nineteenth century and often overlapped within works.