"(Acocella''s book) shines with exemplary good sense. When I read Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism I realized I had gloomily expected that it was virtually impossible these days to write, or to publish, so sensible a book." - New York Review of Books "What this book manages is a comprehensive view of the trends, fads, fashions, and needs that shape the perception of Cather and her work. The critics are treated as products of their time, rather than the writer. This approach is desirable and delightful in the extreme. It is a reminder to readers and scholars that if the truths of literature are mutable, so are the abilities of academics to find or focus on them." - Merrill M. Skaggs, author of ''After the World Broke in Two: The Later Novels of Willa Cather'' "Acocella is pointed and funny in her analysis and compelling in her request to move beyond politics.

"--Publisher''s Weekly A splendid study, this book goes beyond Cather to literary criticism in general."--Choice, June 2000 "What is most astonishing is that Joan Acocella, our nation''s premier dance critic, should also be one of our sharpest literary critics. Here, in a vastly expanded version of her refreshing, astute New Yorker article, she defends Willa Cather from the willful misreadings of academic scholarship. Final score: all points to Acocella and Cather."Wendy Lesser, author of ''The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters'' "Does criticism owe any fidelity to the manifest values of great authors? No one has posed that question more instructively than Joan Acocella. This shrewd, wry, and pithy book at once a critical case history and a manifesto should be read not only by everyone who admires Cather but also by literary academics who suspect, with good reason, that their profession has taken leave of its senses." - Frederick Crews, editor of ''Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend'' "Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism is a sort of gleaming, double-edged thing: both a brisk appreciation of Cather''s artistic achievement and a stern, even cutting assault on modern Cather scholarship. It grows out of a controversial article that Acocella, a well-known dance critic, published in the NewYorker in 1995.

Acocella''s essay registered as brusque and fierce and timely, and relieving free of cant. By taking as her test case an author whose work was spectacularly resistant to the kinds of critical depradation then in fashion, she seemed to point up the inadequacy of the critical models themselves. With a few sharp strokes, Acocella cut through the verbiage to offer a purified, if somewhat old-fashioned, model of literary appreciation: one distinguished, like Cather''s fiction itself, by modesty, tact and unshakable common sense. Acocella is [a] lucid, obdurate force: an intelligent outsider challenging the norms of a somewhat decadent and in-grown professional clique. She is also a marvellous, canny writer."--Terry Castle, London Review of Books, 14 December 2000 "(Acocella''s book) shines with exemplary good sense. When I read >"Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism" I realized I had gloomily >expected that it was virtually impossible these days to write, or to >publish, so sensible a book." New York Review of Books November 30th 1999 "Willa Cather is often thought of as an essentially nostalgic story-teller, an elegist to the spirit of of the old frontiersmen and women, those noble children of the great prairies and deserts of the American West.

As Joan Acocella shows in this sane and sometimes very funny critique of the critics, Cather seemed old-fashioned from the start. What distinguishes her writing, as Ms. Acocella and others have shown . is her tragic vision, her sense of death, her way of seizing her characters imaginatively, rather than explaining them psychologically, and indeed the way her imagaination, far from merely harking back, seized and worked on the whole idea of the past."--THE ECONOMIST, 24 February 2001 >WILLA CATHER AND THE POLITICS OF CRITICISM "Joan Acocella, not an academic, best known for her dance criticism and her occasional pieces in the New Yorker, has written a cogently argued, persuasive, and often very funny overview of the work of Willa Cather and the congeries of literary critics that have followed in her wake, beginning in the first decades of the twentieth century when Cather published her early work and ending at approximately the present time, when Cather has been "rediscovered"--if not resuscitated--by theorists armed with feminist and political jargons brandished like clumsly weapons. "The problem with these critics'' writings", Acocella argues, "is not that they contain politics, but that they contain almost nothing else."--Times Literary Supplement, May 25, 2001 " . lively, punchy, and eminently readable.

"--Review of English Studies, Vol 53, No. 210, 2002.