Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism by Joan Acocella

“Acocella’s most extensive defense of an artist vis-à-vis her biographers and critics is the wickedly entertaining Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, following by a year her work of investigative reportage, Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder, in which, armed with statistics, interviews, and a Menckenesque zest for combat, she is on the attack on virtually every page. Her slender book on Willa Cather is both an overview of the writer and a skewering of numerous proprietary “interpretations” of her work by commentators who see in Cather what they have projected into her in the promulgation of their own prejudices. . . . As metacriticism, this polemic is a work to set beside Janet Malcolm’s classic The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1994).”— Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books