WELCOME
Joyce McDonald is the author of The Stuff of Our Forebears: Willa Cather's Southern Heritage (University of Alabama Press), the first book of literary criticism to address, in depth, the influence of Cather's southern background on her work.
"Cather's connections to the South, formed during her childhood in Virginia, have emerged as a dominant theme in the criticism, marked by Joyce McDonald's book The Stuff of Our Forebears: Willa Cather's Southern Heritage . . . [the book] makes a strong argument for the presence of a 'Southern sensibility' throughout Cather's work . . ." ~Elsa Nettles, American Studies
". . . as we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forebears put into us. ~ from My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather
"The
readings of individual novels provide convincing case studies for Cather's status
as southern writer . . . . In a tour-de-force exegesis, McDonald reads the enigmatic Shadows on the Rock as a pastoral novel, where Cather transposes Virginia values,
enacted in the novel as traditional French culture, on the seventeenth-century
Quebec colony."
~Joseph R. Urgo, Southern
Quarterly:
Journal of the Arts in the South
