Something Complete and Great

The volume situates My ntonia as a novel that stands the test of time by including in its pages an extraordinarily wide range of historical, cultural, literary, psychological, thematic, perceptual, and stylistic issues. The volume provides an analysis and assessment of complexities in the novel as well as its reception and legacy. The essays as a whole situate the novel at the cusp of the modern period, marking in myriad ways the novels transitional role between nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and culture. The first section Translation features writers that reflect on Cathers curious devaluation of My ntonias reception over time; translation issues in Germany, Italty, France, and Russia; and linguistic issues in the novels vision of ntonias acculturation. The second section Tradition defines Cathers relationship to modernism and regionalism through her career shifts and changes to the Introduction as well as her narrative technique in marginalizing violence and darkness to the edges of Jims consicousness. The third section Transgender analyzes Cathers relationship to Hamlin Garlands Life on the Prairie, J. M. Barries Peter Pan and the Neverland, and the work of Truman Capote, especially his gay protagoanist Joel Knox in Other Voices, Other Rooms. The fourth section Transhuman deploys work on hysteria to situate Cathers vision of genderless desire and ecocritical lenses to understand Jim and nature. Finally the last section Transition discusses Lena Lingards presence as a New Woman and gift economies in the novel that underscore the communitys uneasy transition to twentieth-century capitalism. Gathered in the volume are an international group of scholars who demonstrate the novels centrality to womens studies, American studies, queer studies, childhood studies, psychoanalysis, ecology, translation and reception, Marxism, narratology, and intertextuality.