Janis P. Stout's Books

Katherine Anne Porter

A Sense of the Times

By: Janis P. Stout

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Katherine Anne Porter's life closely paralleled that of her century not only in its span (1890-1980) but in its interests and contradictions. A communist sympathizer who became a quasi fascist; a cosmopolitan who embraced southern agrarianism, a femme fatale whose writings nonetheless evince feminist feeling, Porter embodied, often at their extremes, the major currents of her time and ours. In this new biography Janis P. Stout argues that these inconsistencies can be viewed as part and parcel of modernism itself. Drawing on Porter's rich and voluminous correspondence as well as published works, Stout here sets out to craft an intellectual biography of a woman who, by her own admission, was "not really an intellectual". Stout reveals the extent of Porter's involvement in events of public significance and her interactions with prominent figures, from President Alvaro Obregon of Mexico in 1920 to Hermann Goering in Berlin in 1931, to Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Allen Tate, and others in the 1930s and 1940s, to members of the Lyndon Johnson White House in the 1960s. Against the backdrop of world war and cold war, Porter's conflicting views on politics, race, religion, and feminism reflected Porter's ambivalence toward her own Texas roots.

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432

Publisher

University of Virginia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813915686

ISBN 13

9780813915685

Willa Cather

The Writer and Her World

By: Janis P. Stout

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Willa Cather

The Writer and Her World

By: Janis P. Stout

Previous biographies of Willa Cather have either recycled the traditional view of a writer detached from social issues whose work supported a wholesome view of a vanished America, or they have focused solely on revelations about her private life. Challenging these narrow interpretations, Janis P. Stout presents a Cather whose life and quietly modernist work fully reflected the artistic and cultural tensions of her day. A product of the South--she was born in Virginia--Cather went west with her family at an early age, a participant in the aspirations of Manifest Destiny. Known for her celebrations of immigrants on the prairie, she in fact shared many of the ethnic suspicions of her contemporaries. Loved by a popular audience for her pieties of family and religion, she was in her youth a freethinker who resisted traditional patterns for women's lives, cutting her hair like a boy's and dressing in men's clothing. Seen by critics since the 1930s as a practitioner of an escapist formalism, she was, in Stout's view, profoundly ambivalent about most of the important questions she faced. Cather structured her writing to control her uncertainty and project a serenity she did not in fact feel. Cather has at times been viewed as a writer preoccupied with the past whose literary project had little to do with the intellectual currents of her time. On the contrary, Stout argues, Cather was a full participant in the doubts and conflicts of twentieth-century modernity. Only in recoil from her distress at these conflicts did she turn to overt celebrations of the past and construct a retiring, crotchety persona. The Cather that emerges from Stout's treatment is a modernist conservative in the mold of T. S. Eliot, though more responsive to her time and simultaneously less assured in her pronouncements. Cather's sexuality, too, is more complicated in Stout's version than previous biographers have allowed. Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World presents a woman and an artist who fully exemplifies the ambivalence, the foreboding, and above all the complexity that we associate with the twentieth-century mind.

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408

Publisher

University of Virginia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813933609

ISBN 13

9780813933603

Through the Window, Out the Door

Women's Narratives of Departure, from Austin and Cather to Tyler, Morrison, and Didion

By: Janis P. Stout

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Through the Window, Out the Door

Women's Narratives of Departure, from Austin and Cather to Tyler, Morrison, and Didion

By: Janis P. Stout

This informative and provocative study focuses on the centrality of departure in the texts of five major American women novelists. An important moment in many novels and poems by American women writers occurs when a central character looks out a window or walks out the door of a house. These acts of departure serve to convey such values as the rejection of constraining social patterns, the search for individual fulfillment, and the entry into the political. Janis Stout examines such moments and related patterns of venture and travel in the fiction of five major American novelists of the 20th century: Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Anne Tyler, Toni Morrison, and Joan Didion. Stout views these five writers within a spectrum of narrative engagements with issues of home and departure—a spectrum anchored at one end by Sarah Orne Jewett and at the other by Marilynne Robinson, whose Housekeeping posits a vision of female transience. Through the Window, Out the Door ranges over an expansive territory. Moving between texts as well as between texts and contexts, Stout shows how women writers have envisioned the walls of physical and social structures (including genres) as permeable boundaries, drawing on both a rhetoric of liberation and a rhetoric of domesticity to construct narrative arguments for women's right to move freely between the two. Stout concludes with a personal essay on the dilemmas of domesticity and the ambivalence of departure.

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Page Count

336

Publisher

University Alabama Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0817360123

ISBN 13

9780817360122

Cather Among the Moderns

By: Janis P. Stout

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Cather Among the Moderns

By: Janis P. Stout

A masterful study by a preeminent scholar that situates Cather as a visionary practitioner of literary modernism Willa Cather is often pegged as a regionalist, a feminine and domestic writer, or a social realist. In Cather Among the Moderns, Janis P. Stout firmly situates Cather as a visionary practitioner of literary modernism, something other scholars have hinted at but rarely affirmed. Stout presents Cather on a large, dramatic stage among a sizable cast of characters and against a brightly lit social and historical backdrop, invoking numerous figures and instances from the broad movement in the arts and culture that we call modernism. Early on, Stout addresses the matter of gender. The term “cross-dresser” has often been applied to Cather, but Stout sees Cather’s identity as fractured or ambiguous, a reading that links her firmly to early twentieth-century modernity. Later chapters take up topics of significance both to Cather and to twentieth-century American modernists, including shifting gender roles, World War I’s devastation of social and artistic norms, and strains in racial relations. She explores Cather’s links to a small group of modernists who, after the war, embraced life in New Mexico, a destination of choice for many artists, and which led to two of Cather’s most fully realized modernist novels, The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop. The last chapter addresses Cather’s place within modernism. Stout first places her in relation to Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot with their shared ties to tradition even while making, sometimes startling, innovations in literary form, then showing parallels with William Faulkner with respect to economic disparity and social injustice.

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Page Count

281

Publisher

University Alabama Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0817320148

ISBN 13

9780817320140

Picturing a Different West

Vision, Illustration, and the Tradition of Austin and Cather

By: Janis P. Stout

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Picturing a Different West

Vision, Illustration, and the Tradition of Austin and Cather

By: Janis P. Stout

Picturing a Different West addresses Willa Cather and Mary Austin as central figures in a women's tradition of the pictured West. Both Cather and Austin moved west in their youth and spent much of their lives there. Cather lived on the Great Plains, while Austin resided in California and the Southwest. Cather's travels repeatedly took her to the Southwest, and she wrote three novels with Southwestern settings. Starting with the masculine tradition of Western art that was prevalent when Austin and Cather launched their careers, Janis P. Stout shows how the authors challenged and revised that tradition. Rather than a West of adventure, violence, and conquest, open only to rugged and daring men, the authors envisioned a new West--not conventionally feminine so much as an androgynous space of freedom for women and men alike. Their vision of an alternative West and their alternative ways of thinking about and portraying gender are inseparable. Placing Cather and Austin alongside contemporaries Elsie Clews Parsons, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Laura Gilpin, Stout emphasizes the visual nature of Austin's and Cather's personal experiences of the West and Southwest, their awareness of the prevailing visual representations of the West, and the visual nature of their books about the West, with respect to both prose style and illustrations. In closing, Stout demonstrates the continuance of their tradition in illustrated western books by Leslie Marmon Silko and by Margaret Randall and Barbara Byers.

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336

Publisher

Texas Tech University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

089672610X

ISBN 13

9780896726109

Coming Out of War

Poetry, Grieving, and the Culture of the World Wars

By: Janis P. Stout

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Coming Out of War

Poetry, Grieving, and the Culture of the World Wars

By: Janis P. Stout

While emphasizing aesthetic continuity between the wars, Stout stresses that the poetry that emerged from each displays a greater variety than is usually recognized."--Jacket.

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Page Count

295

Publisher

University of Alabama Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0817358625

ISBN 13

9780817358624

South by Southwest

Katherine Anne Porter and the Burden of Texas History

By: Janis P. Stout

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South by Southwest

Katherine Anne Porter and the Burden of Texas History

By: Janis P. Stout

An interdisciplinary study of Katherine Anne Porter’s troubled relationship to her Texas origins and southern roots, South by Southwest offers a fresh look at this ever-relevant author. Today, more than thirty years after her death, Katherine Anne Porter remains a fascinating figure. Critics and biographers have portrayed her as a strikingly glamorous woman whose photographs appeared in society magazines. They have emphasized, of course, her writing— particularly the novel Ship of Fools, which was made into an award-winning film, and her collection Pale Horse, Pale Rider, which cemented her role as a significant and original literary modernist. They have highlighted her dramatic, sad, and fragmented personal life. Few, however, have addressed her uneasy relationship to her childhood in rural Texas. Janis P. Stout argues that throughout Porter’s life she remained preoccupied with the twin conundrums of how she felt about being a woman and how she felt about her Texas origins. Her construction of herself as a beautiful but unhappy southerner sprung from a plantation aristocracy of reduced fortunes meant she construed Texas as the Old South. The Texas Porter knew and re-created in her fiction had been settled by southerners like her grandparents, who brought slaves with them. As she wrote of this Texas, she also enhanced and mythologized it, exaggerating its beauty, fertility, and gracious ways as much as the disaffection that drove her to leave. Her feelings toward Texas ran to both extremes, and she was never able to reconcile them. Stout examines the author and her works within the historical and cultural context from which she emerged. In particular, Stout emphasizes four main themes in the history of Texas that she believes are of the greatest importance in understanding Porter: its geography and border location (expressed in Porter’s lifelong fascination with marginality, indeterminacy, and escape); its violence (the brutality of her first marriage as well as the lawlessness that pervaded her hometown); its racism (lynchings were prevalent throughout her upbringing); and its marginalization of women (Stout draws a connection between Porter’s references to the burning sun and oppressive heat of Texas and her life with her first husband).

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Page Count

265

Publisher

University of Alabama Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0817317821

ISBN 13

9780817317829

A Family Likeness

A Novel

By: Janis P. Stout

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A Family Likeness

A Novel

By: Janis P. Stout

This novel is a story of three women and the worlds the inhabit, of the conflict between generations, of how lives are changed by the movements of the world around them. The story is set in Texas and tells the story of the McCalls, people severed from their lives in the cotton culture of East Texas, broken by the depression, seeking a new life in the big city."--Jacket.

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180

Published Date

ISBN 10

0932012264

ISBN 13

9780932012265

Cather Among the Moderns

By: Janis P. Stout

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Cather Among the Moderns

By: Janis P. Stout

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281

Publisher

University Alabama Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0817320148

ISBN 13

9780817320140

South by Southwest

Katherine Anne Porter and the Burden of Texas History

By: Janis P. Stout

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South by Southwest

Katherine Anne Porter and the Burden of Texas History

By: Janis P. Stout

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265

Publisher

University of Alabama Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0817317821

ISBN 13

9780817317829

Through the Window, Out the Door

Women's Narratives of Departure, from Austin and Cather to Tyler, Morrison, and Didion

By: Janis P. Stout

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Through the Window, Out the Door

Women's Narratives of Departure, from Austin and Cather to Tyler, Morrison, and Didion

By: Janis P. Stout

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Page Count

336

Publisher

University Alabama Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0817360123

ISBN 13

9780817360122

Coming Out of War

Poetry, Grieving, and the Culture of the World Wars

By: Janis P. Stout

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Coming Out of War

Poetry, Grieving, and the Culture of the World Wars

By: Janis P. Stout

While emphasizing aesthetic continuity between the wars, Stout stresses that the poetry that emerged from each displays a greater variety than is usually recognized."--Jacket.

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Page Count

295

Publisher

University of Alabama Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0817358625

ISBN 13

9780817358624

Willa Cather

The Writer and Her World

By: Janis P. Stout

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Willa Cather

The Writer and Her World

By: Janis P. Stout

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Page Count

408

Publisher

University of Virginia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813933609

ISBN 13

9780813933603

Katherine Anne Porter

A Sense of the Times

By: Janis P. Stout

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Katherine Anne Porter

A Sense of the Times

By: Janis P. Stout

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

432

Publisher

University of Virginia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813915686

ISBN 13

9780813915685

Book's by Janis P. Stout

Katherine Anne Porter

Katherine Anne Porter

Willa Cather

Willa Cather

Through the Window, Out the Door

Through the Window, Out the Door

Cather Among the Moderns

Cather Among the Moderns

Picturing a Different West

Picturing a Different West

Coming Out of War

Coming Out of War

South by Southwest

South by Southwest

A Family Likeness

A Family Likeness

Cather Among the Moderns

Cather Among the Moderns

South by Southwest

South by Southwest

Through the Window, Out the Door

Through the Window, Out the Door

Coming Out of War

Coming Out of War

Willa Cather

Willa Cather

Katherine Anne Porter

Katherine Anne Porter

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