Alexander's Bridge (World's Classics) - Softcover

Cather, Willa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 019283214X ISBN 13: 9780192832146

Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks, 1997

Synopsis

Willa Cather's first novel, "Alexander's Bridge" (1912), tells the story of Bartley Alexander, a successful engineer torn between his duties to his career and his wife Winifred, 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. For readers who know Cather chiefly for her portraits of indomitable women on the Nebraska frontier - in such works as "O Pioneers!" and "My Antonia" - "Alexander's Bridge" shows the novelist working in another, equally important mode, using urban settings and the figure of the bridge-builder to analyze America's emergence as an international, industrial power at the turn into the 20th century. Both anxious and celebratory, the novel anticipates "The Great Gatsby" in trying to reckon with the social and emotional costs of that emergence.

About this title

About the Author

Marilee Lindemann is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has published articles on Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, and is completing a study of Cather.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 019283214X
• ISBN 13: 9780192832146
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 151
• Editor: Lindemann Marilee