Willa Cather's Sexual Aesthetics and the Male Homosexual Literary Tradition

Willa Cather is primarily known for her creation of strong female characters, yet her fiction often centers on male friendships. In this first full-length study of male homosexuality in Cather's short stories and novels, John P. Anders examines patterns of male friendship ranging on a continuum from the social to the sexual. He argues that Cather worked in the familiar tradition of friendship literature inspired by classical and Christian texts and also borrowed from a homosexual legacy that is …