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Deploying the concepts and techniques of Body Studies, this book remaps Willa Cather’s writing from the 1890s through to 1940. This study of embodiment and narrative focuses on the senses and reads Cather as a writer at the transition from late Victorian to Modernist models of representation. The book presents suggestive new ways of understanding her depictions of disability , male bodies and Native American culture, not to mention her narratives of whiteness and of the black body. The book explores Cather’s ‘sensorium’ – her imaginative exploration of sounds, sights, tastes, smells and the tactile. Sensing Willa Cather draws on recent work in queer, disability, ageing and food studies to re-contextualize her fiction. The first three chapters explore Cather’s writing in relationship to sense studies, and also such movements as Aestheticism and Modernism. The next five, roughly tracing the evolution of her career from an apprenticeship as a reviewer and journalist through to the established novelist, focus on the five senses. Sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell: each sense is successively linked to Cather’s work, and used to explore her profound interest in corporealism. The final chapter. ‘The Body of the Author’, then examines Cather’s last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, and Cather’s representation both of her own bodily presence and that of other writers.

What do our everyday experiences and bodily movements have to do with our theological imagination? How should we draw the connection between lived experience and theology? Feminist theologians, as well as other scholars, appeal to the importance of bodily experiences and perceptions when developing claims regarding social and cultural values and argue that our actions are always meaningful. But where and how do these arguments gain traction beyond mere thinking about methods in religious studies or theological exploring of metaphors? Religious scholars and theologians need to acquire a robust grasp on how sensory perceptions and interactions are cultural and theological acts that are bodily meaning making. This book presents a method of tracing embodied experience in order to account for meaning in everyday movements and encounters by strengthening and refining the concept of “experience” through a set of analytical commitments built on Maurice Merlau-Ponty’s phenomenological concepts. The notion of bodily experience is extended to that which makes up our social and theological knowledges. Bodily perceptual experiences are ways of thinking and orienting in the world, therefore comprising theological imagination. This is demonstrated in historical and cultural comparisons where taste, touch, and emitted sounds may order normalcy, social status, or communal belonging. Constructive body theology as analytical tool is tested in feminist projects known for their explicit turn to experience and embodiment (Carter Heyward, Marcella Althaus-Reid). This book concludes with presentations of constructive possibilities that emerge when everyday bodily experience is utilized effectively as a source for religious and theological inquiries.