Unsettling Willa Cather’s West
A special issue of Western American Literature
Guest edited by Emily J. Rau
Contact email: erau2@unl.edu or waljournal@gmail.com
As the recently unveiled statue in National Statuary Hall and the extensive media coverage of her 150th birthday illustrate, Willa Cather endures as a powerful representative of Nebraska and the Great Plains. She continues to be rightfully celebrated for her intimate and compassionate portrayal of the lives of women and immigrants in the region and for her compelling life story. However, many popular and scholarly discussions of Cather’s work still fail to reckon with her erasure of Indigenous peoples in the Great Plains and with her embeddedness in the settler colonial project. Recent work on Cather has begun to take up these topics and others, and this special issue of Western American Literature will bring some of that work together in one volume.
We seek proposals that productively critique Cather for her silences, put her in new conversations and contexts, and unsettle traditional readings of her representations of the US West. Slated for publication in Summer 2025, we invite essays from new and emerging voices in Cather studies that address one or more of the following or related topics:
• Cather and settler colonialism
• Cather’s treatment of Indigenous peoples in her work
• Cather’s silences
• Cather and other literary representations of the Great Plains
• Ecocritical readings of Cather’s western works
• Comparative studies of Cather’s Great Plains and Southwest works
• Cather as a queer figure in western literature
• Cather’s representation of immigration and diversity on the Great Plains
Submit proposals of up to 500 words to guest editor Emily Rau at erau2@unl.edu or waljournal@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is April 1, 2024. If a proposal is accepted, manuscripts of 10 to 25 pages will be due October 1, 2024.
Publication date: Summer 2025
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