| Alexander's Bridge Contributor(s): Cather, Willa (Author), Slote, Bernice (Introduction by) |
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ISBN: 0803258631 ISBN-13: 9780803258631 Publisher: Bison Books OUR PRICE: $10.76 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: June 1977 Annotation: Alexander's Bridge (1912), Willa Cather's first novel, tells the story of Bartley Alexander, a successful engineer torn between duty to his career and wife, and his passion for the Irish actress Hilda Burgoyne. In spare but often searing prose, Cather's taut novella traces a mid-life crisis of self-doubt and disappointment that ends in a spectacular catastrophe. Cather's portraits of indomitable women on the Nebraska frontier in the novels O Pioneers! and My Antonia are well-known, but Alexander's Bridge shows her working in another, equally important mode, using urban settings and the figure of the bridge-builder to analyse America's emergence as an international industrial power at the turn of the twentieth century. Both anxious and celebratory, Alexander's Bridge anticipates The Great Gatsby in trying to reckon with the social and emotional costs of a new era in American life. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Literary |
| Dewey: FIC |
| LCCN: 76056439 |
| Physical Information: 0.39" H x 5.26" W x 7.94" (0.39 lbs) 140 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - British Isles - Cultural Region - New England - Cultural Region - Northeast U.S. - Geographic Orientation - Massachusetts |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Willa Cather's first published novel, set in Boston, London, and Paris, is the story of a man unable to resolve the contradictions in his own nature. The central figures are Bartley Alexander, a world-famous engineer; his wife; Winifred, a Boston society matron; and his former love, Hilda Burgoyne, a London actress. Long considered an uncharacteristic production, in the light of recent scholarship Alexander's Bridge is seen to be closely linked to the body of Cather's work, thematically as well as in its use of myth and symbol. Bernice Slote's introduction considers the circumstances of its composition and its relationship to the later novels, particularly One of Ours, The Professor's House, and Lucy Gayheart. The text has been entirely reset from the first (1912) edition. Bernice Slote, a distinguished Cather scholar, was a professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her publications included editions of April Twilights (1903); Poems of Willa Cather (1962, 1968); The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893-1896 (1967); and Uncle Valentine and Other Stories: Willa Cather's Uncollected Short Fiction (1973, 1986), all published by the UNP. |