Willa Cather's sexual aesthetics and the male homosexual literary tradition

"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 part of, yet distinct from, established literary traditions.

In combining these two traditions Cather gave her fiction an unexpected depth and complexity."--BOOK JACKET.