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Studies in American Fiction247 production" (p. 8) under which texts become transmitted to a reading public are the changes sanctioned by the author at various stages of the creative process. In their neglect of such evidence, the contributors ignore the possibility that Cooper was both a better historian and craftsman than their ideological and aesthetic assumptions would allow. Worcester Polytechnic InstituteKent Ljungquist Rosowski, Susan J. The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986. 284 pp. Cloth: $22.95. Without doubt, Susan J. Rosowski's The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism is the most intense and provocative book-length study of Cather's fiction to date. Rosowski shapes Cather's career into dramas involving imaginative vision and artistic recreation of the world in O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, My Antonia, and A Lost Lady; into discoveries of archetypal truths and struggles toward selflessness when art is undermined by modern materialism in The Professor's House, My Mortal Enemy, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Shadows on the Rock; and into explorations of the chaotic gothic underside of the romantic imagination in Lucy Gayheart and Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Cather's untypical first novel, Alexander's Bridge, and her Pulitzer Prize winning one, One of Ours, depict failed attempts to achieve the fusion between subject and object necessary for artistic vision. Much of this is rather heady stuff and betrays some straining to intellectualize the novelist, but most of the theorizing hits the mark and illuminates the fiction. Of particular value is Rosowski's use of early stories like "On the Divide," "The Enchanted Bluff," and "The Bohemian Girl" to trace Cather's imaginative creation of Nebraska through symbols and myth and to arrive at that vision of the New World so successfully achieved in O Pioneers! and My Antonia. The chapters on these prairie novels and The Song ofthe Lark and A Lost Lady are among the best in this book. Cather's use of the pastoral tradition made Nebraska a setting for the miraculous vision of Alexandra Bergson, the heroine of O Pioneers!, whose artistry symmetrically ordered the wilderness. In The Song of the Lark, Cather focused on the psychology of the artist-heroine, Thea Kronborg, exploring imaginative growth from negative to positive romantic stances in ways that resemble Wordsworth's awakening sense of artistic power in The Prelude. The Wordsworth connection is also evident in My Antonia, which is to American fiction "what Wordsworth had introduced to English poetry a century earlier—the continuously changing work" (p. 75). In this prairie masterpiece, Cather kept the miraculous and the ordinary in better balance than she did in the more mythic O Pioneers!, an achievement manipulated through a constantly shifting balance between the mind (narrator Jim Burden) and the object (Antonia). A Lost Lady dramatizes similar tensions between the ideal envisioned by the mind and the reality of the object envisioned (the prairie heroine). If the mind has difficulty in buttoning down Antonia, Marian Forrester offers a greater challenge; with 248Reviews her, "resolution becomes correspondingly more difficult" (p. 119). Her truth is in our fluid, symbolic experience of her. Rosowski is as successful and perhaps more original in her treatment of Cather's final and lesser known novels, Lucy Gayheart and Sapphira and the Slave Girl. These are offered as dramas of the underside of romanticism, "when resolution is thwarted and irreconcilables triumph" (p. 207). To prepare for these, she contributes a catalog of the demonic forces in Cather, from apprentice stories to major novels, including portraits of Wick Cutter in My Antonia and Ivy Peters in A Lost Lady, and the "Stone Lips" episode in Death Comes for the Archbishop. In this vein, the problematic Lucy Gayheart is discussed as Bram Stoker's Dracula retold from the female point of view. Not fit for a life of art, Lucy is doomed to surrender to another, argues Rosowski (revealing a usually disciplined tendency to feminize). The Sebastian-Lucy relationship in this novel somewhat parallels the Sapphira-Nancy relationship in Sapphira, a novel of the South suggesting the inevitable threat of the irrational. We are advised here to reread Cather through the lens...

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