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Against the backdrop of the current interest in the institutions of literature the essay deploys Luc Boltanski's social theory of institutional confirmation and critique for a comparative analysis of two key writers in the emergent field of US literature around 1900: Wiliam Dean Howells and Willa Cather. Visiting Howells in the editor's study at Harper's New Monthly Magazine and Cather in the corporate office at McClure's Magazine the essay traces how each publishing institution not only informs their criticism and correspondence but also seeps into their fiction. Framed by editorial columns and archival materials Howells's story "The Critical Bookstore" (1913) as well as Cather's early short fiction and her debut novel Alexander's Bridge (1912) can be seen to engage what Boltanski calls the "semantic security" of institutions. Building on sociologically inflected readings of these texts the essay considers Boltanski's claim that critique is an inherent effect of institutionalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Great Plains literature has long been dominated by the pioneer ideal put forth by authors such as Willa Gather. This essay claims that a thread of contemporary authors of the region are now challenging these myths and creating works that engage a repressed history of the Great Plains through a use of the Gothic genre. In her three collections of Wyoming stories, Annie Proulx creates a sober picture of the region that focuses on painful aspects such as isolation, violence, and an unforgiving landscape. Her fiction makes use of a wide range of Gothic tropes and builds on the tradition of the Southern Gothic. After defining a Great Plains Gothic and examining Proulx's work, the essay concludes by exploring other contemporary Plains writers working in a Gothic mode and countering mythic depictions of the region, several of whom take a particular focus on the repressed history concerning the oppression of Native Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins by revisiting a conversation I had with Alice Munro in 1987 in which she named her favorite story by Willa Cather, "Old Mrs. Harris" (1932). After that conversation I went on to analyze Cather's influence on Munro in her own story, "Dulse" (1980)—where Cather is in effect a character—in my article "Alice Munro's Willa Cather" (1992). But until now I have not pursued the structural symmetry mentioned in passing there between "Old Mrs. Harris" and Munro's "The Progress of Love" (1985), the title story of her sixth collection. This article does that, treating the three women in each story—grandmother, daughter, granddaughter—through both their autobiographical underpinnings and the narrative wisdom each story ultimately yields. This comparison is an instance of direct influence, of one great writer modeling for another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to explore the thematic dimensions of Claude Wheeler's philosophy about life and death in Willa Cather's One of Ours (1922), which seem to be vague and complex at the same time. This philosophy that Claude develops through his relationships with the surroundings and the people around him governs the way he thinks about life and death, and thus veers and reshapes his torrent of thought that he made within in terms of several aspects pertaining to his psychological, romantic, spiritual, and military life. Despite the fact that Claude Wheeler is an ambiguous character who seeks for more harmony with his ideal self, his personality weakness functions as a motivating factor for more self-development and personality growth. Wheeler deeply and philosophically recognizes this desire which finally enables him to critically understand the meaning of his life much better through ideals and values he establishes for himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Society in the twenty-first century is characterized by selfishness, artificiality, and indifference that threaten altruistic values and the ideal coexistence of humankind. Considering the context of modern times and rapid changes in the paradigm of economic society, this study focuses on the belief that humankind must be integrated and connected harmoniously. The study suggests that the futuristic figures from Willa Cather's novel, "The Professor's House," like gargoyles, can be alternative models that lead to an altruistic and positive future by implementing the right social values in an imagined community of care. In the novel, Cather presents a model of integrated humans and an imagined community that prioritizes coexistence and convergence. Further, she explores the importance of new figures and future communities through connectedness, multi-communities for care, shared identity, social solidity, diverse caring experiences, and core skills for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark (1915) critically revises late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropology to form an aesthetics of materiality. The works of anthropologists such as Otis Mason and Lewis Henry Morgan presumed cultures, especially those they defined as primitive, to be bounded, static wholes, totalities expressed through a people and their material objects, both constrained by the determinants of race and environment. The Song of the Lark engages with such anthropological discourses in its passages representing the material remains of those labelled "Cliff Dwellers." However, the novel opens a gap between object and anthropology by figuring the remains as aesthetic objects, markers of transformation, loss, and incompletion. In contrast to Cather's better known aesthetic statement, the essay "The Novel Démeublé" (1922) , The Song of the Lark's dialectical responses to anthropology offer ways to understand aesthetic creation and reception in everyday experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the distinct aspects of Czech American living culture in Nebraska and invites new perspectives on immigration discourse. The state of Nebraska experienced significant Czech and European immigration. This study rethinks the Czech American immigrants' legacy as it explores its current sociocultural and linguistic capital, local voices, and relevant historical context. lt is inspired by research field trips in 2017-2021 to Czech American communities in Nebraska, especially in the Bohemian Alps (Saunders, Butler, and Colfax Counties). It explores the reasons for Czech American culture's perseverance and social meanings and its unique preservation of language, culture, and traditions. It uses the so-called literary ethnography method, which narrates observations of social practices and interactions in the present. The study bears time-sensitive importance, as it utilizes interviews and data to explore the inner workings of this particular culture. Further, the study considers Willa Cather's observations on the cultural tenacity of Czech and immigrant culture in the 1920s and her hurocentric omissions of indigenous cultures. It considers acculturation tensions that immigrants faced as reasons for cultural conservation. lt incorporates Ted Kooser's and Mike Farrell's artistic statements on the region and its people. Reevaluating the legacy of the immigrants' cultures from the immigrants' perspective a hundred years later, the study examines how the imported and adapted meanings of a small European cultural nation (eventually forming the state of Czechoslovakia in 1918) and Old World nationalism became the basis for the current Czech American identity. This article hopes to advance the current understanding of immigrants and immigration in Nebraska and beyond while it examines Czech American identity and living culture in the Bohemian Alps of Nebraska. This study hopes to invigorate the discussion of the meanings of linguistic and cultural preservation within complex American identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Dawn Bakken, IMH associate editor, reviews seven volumes in the Belt Revivals series, which reprints important fiction and non-fiction by famous and lesser-known midwestern authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to trace the assimilation process of European immigrants to the United States at the turn of the century in Willa Cather’s My Antonia (1918) and Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934). Bearing in mind the historical relevance of race and whiteness in the United States, I analyse the changes performed by Cather’s and Roth’s protagonists in order to achieve the status of white. To this purpose, I provide a brief overview of the nature of whiteness in the United States and its epistemological changes to account for its importance within the novels. I then look at the transformations characters perform in terms of religious faith and gender norms, as well as their interaction with English and spaces to become integrated in the new land. In doing so, differences between the novels arise, but so does a subtext of violence common to the immigrant experience.

Willa Cather's The Professor's House dismantles feminine behaviors, as Cather ascribes new meaning to her marginalized female characters' independent acts and depicts male characters being saved by women. Cather's care and care ethics are based on human relations; they highlight empathy, responsibility, acceptance, and emotion-based practice. She accordingly shows sincere care and acts in the spirit of salvation for the characters' surroundings, culture, and society through marginalized figures such as Augusta, Mother Eve, and Tom. These are examples of alternative caregivers who develop a connection-based relationship through their sincerity and attentiveness and cultural and social care. In their care, we observe a spirit of self-sacrifice and the possibility of a true bond between them and others and their communities. This article conveys Cather's capacity for serving as a conduit for healing and solidarity and proves her visionary force of care practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Willa Cather's novel Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) offers a reflection on the role that religious faith can play in the creation and maintenance of national identity and social solidarity. As liberal democracies develop and their populations become more diverse, the citizens of these societies must find new points of commonality in order to maintain the sense that they share something important with others. Cather's novel depicts the United States at the time of its expansion into the Southwest as a nation that faces the challenge of how to incorporate the region's inhabitants into the American nation. The novel's protagonist, Jean Marie Latour, is a French Catholic bishop who arrives in New Mexico with little respect for or understanding of the people of this "heathen country." Latour eventually learns how to enter into communion and friendship with those who share neither his cultural practices nor his religious beliefs. While religious faith can be a source of political division, Cather's novel suggests that religious practices, and in particular Catholic devotional practices, have the potential to be beneficial to liberal, democratic political orders by contributing to the formation of social bonds that transcend divisions of ethnicity, class, and even faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of English Studies is the property of Universidad de la Rioja, Servicio de Publicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Freudian neurosis, despite being a psychological disorder rather than a literary topic, has been used in literature to conceptualise characters' suffering. Freud contends that the suppression of desires due to hidden and unhidden causes leads to neurosis. Being unable to succeed in life, individuals feel neurotic and tend to displace their frustrations onto other persons or objects. Starting with the Renaissance, this article explores how displacement in Shakespeare's Hamlet is tacitly approached and how this reaction has become a recurrent case in Willa Cather's A Lost Lady (1923) and Laila Al Halaby's Once in a Promised Land (2007). The article analyses the incentives of neurosis in each work, how these reasons lead to the onset of displacement and how literary works share relatively similar implications about displacement despite being about different issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An American writer Willa Cather (1873-1947), in her many works which have inspired today's environmental movements, defines human being as an existence not over but within nature and who belongs to it. 'Neighbour Rosicky', which she wrote in 1928 deals with the protagonist, who grows up in city, sees the problems brought by rapid industrialization, materialism and modernization and chooses rural life. Rosicky's philosophy of life overlaps with 'New Agrarian' principles, which are not antropocentric but ecocentric and are land-based: to be the master of his own land, holistic concept of time, a strong sensibility of place, connection to family and past, simplicity and refusal of the characteristics of consumer society. Rosicky who learns farming after thirty-five, accepts life and death as they are, enjoys what he has, does not work for the extra and tries hard for his children to adopt this life-style. He is polite, helpful and understanding and emphasizes universal virtues; he has adopted the holistic view of life and actualized himself in this way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a form of homage to her cousin killed in action, Willa Cather wrote an ambiguous novel, in which the need to glorify WWI soldiers is mingled with a disenchanted depiction of the United States. At the end of the novel, the lofty ideals that permeated the American nation during the conflict do not seem to have put an end to the consumerism that was already rampant before the war. In her attempt to resuscitate an idealism that seemed to have deserted the modern world, Cather was accused of sentimentalism by the literati of the time as well as many critics of the following decades, despite the book's considerable popular success. Some critics, however, later pointed out that the many ironies of the narrative should dissuade the reader from hastily equating the author's perspective with that of Claude, the protagonist. By looking at the many echoes that Joan of Arc's story finds in the novel, I shall argue that her story symbolizes both the ideal and its loss, the former now irrevocably confined to a legendary past. We shall see in particular how the voices that Claude encounters in Nebraska serve to designate France as a far-off land that could accommodate all of his ideals, and how the voices that he eventually hears in France actually belie his idealized vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Willa Sibert Cather, one of the most eminent writers of American literature expresses through her fictions the dialectic between one's conscious socio-cultural identity and his or her unconscious self: a self that remains unexpressed due to the suppression of social norms. Cather herself always remained outside the prescribed stereotypes assigned to women. She portrays her characters through her own hidden sensibility and make them the messenger of what she cannotpublicly articulate. I have based my thesis on one of Willa Cather's frontier novels O Pioneers! and investigated the portrait of Alexandra in the light of Cather's own life to bring into focus the dilemma of Cather's own self to remain within the social structure by abiding by the assigned gender role suppressing her unconscious desire with the help of the book Cather, Canon and the Politics of Reading by Deborah Carlin and the famous critic Sharon O'Brien. While dealing with O Pioneers! I have found similarities between Alexandra's attitude towards life, her own sexual orientation with that of Willa Cather. Willa Cather who is regarded a lesbian writer in late twentieth century expresses her latent desires and identity crisis at the advent of the new pseudo sciences. Persons like Cather who felt and desired outside convention, encountered social criticism. Cather as a public figure could not articulate her homosexual orientation due to the social stigma associated with female friendship. Therefore she conditions her heroine Alexandra in such a way that she [Alexandra] becomes an embodiment of Cather's unarticulated passions and emotional intensity. Thus through O Pioneers! Cather also takes up a critical stance against Victorian bourgeois ethics that snatches individual autonomy to maintain the power equation proper. Therefore, my reading and analysis of O Pioneers! will also include a socio-cultural criticism of nineteenth century ritual of heteronormativity along with the biographical elements wefind in the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the story "Paul's Case" by American author Willa Cather is presented. It examines the main character of Paul, who is based on a real person, and how his behavior corresponds with a diagnosis of autistic spectrum disorder, describing some of the symptoms and comparing them to Paul's actions.

Since the mid-1970s, Willa Cather has been claimed as one of their own by critics keen to defend various liberal causes; but this in terpretation of her novels is challenged by the ambiguous posture she adopts towards the very idea of progress, which she treats with suspicion. This article defends the opposite hypothesis--that Cather is in fact what Antoine Compagnon terms an anti-modern writer, one who is fascinated by modernity yet in whom it arouses feelings of uneasiness, anxiety, and even fear. In Cather's world, the rising sense of loneliness--defined by Hannah Arendt as the loss of the proper distance between the self and others, between the subject and itself, between the self and the world--is what characterizes modern experience at its most disturbing. In My Ántonia, Cather seeks to counter this threat by offering a reassuring and, at times, almost utopian vision, but this is still a way of pointing out, albeit indirectly, what is most problematic about a time of deep ethical crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the current approach of virtual museums in presenting the lives of queer subjects, especially when a subject's queerness is either almost completely obscured or seriously misrepresented in favor of a less controversial, more readily marketable version. Examining the Willa Cather Foundation virtual museum, this study critiques the selective erasure of various facets of historic figures' lives and explores alternative approaches to reconcile similar situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writers play an important role in the environmental movement, indirectly by promoting a vision of life in harmony with nature, and directly by inspiring action to preserve landscapes and ecosystems. The sacred quality of places enables individuals to make intimate contact with the wild world and in turn with the wild self. The conservation of nature requires a respectful attitude towards place and landscape. The land is seen as a community to which people belong, and naturally it is used with love and respect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a comparative reading of two war novels: One of Ours, by Willa Cather, and The Unvanquished, by William Faulkner. The comparison addresses gender construction and gender subversion in the socially disruptive context of military conflict. Focusing mainly on two characters, Claude Wheeler and Drusilla Hawk, I intend to investigate the war in the novels as a space chosen by both authors to test out the young characters’ gender (in-)conformity and the extent of their ability to challenge social and religious convention. Since both join the army voluntarily, the war appears as a site for social destruction as much as for individual construction. I am interested in the fact that both writers chose a soldier-figure of the opposite sex and will be discussing the reasons for such options and possible theoretical implications.

In a 1979 interview, Sharon Pollock, one of the most outstanding contemporary Canadian playwrights, asserted that: "Canadians have this view of themselves as nice civilized people who have never participated in historical crimes and atrocities [...] But that view is false". In her 1973 play Walsh, she dramatized the history of Chief Sitting Bull and his failed attempt at finding retreat in Canada after the battle at Little Bighorn. The play focuses on Sitting Bull's interchange with the NWMP officer Major Walsh, and the causes for the eventual disaster of the Sioux: while Sitting Bull claimed that the Sioux were as much Canadian Indians as American, given that the Great Plains were their traditional hunting grounds, the Canadian authorities saw the Sioux as American Indians who had trespassed the international boundary into Canada and should be persuaded to leave. The essay proposes to discuss Pollock's Walsh as an example of "historiographic metadrama" (Knowles), and as an important contribution to reconstructing a crucial episode in Canadian Indigenous history that has proven requisite for the country's self-definition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In A Lost Lady and My Mortal Enemy, Willa Cather endows things with an active role in the plots and a new relief in her writing. Far from remaining hidden in the background of settings, things occupy the foreground of the diegetic and narrative spaces. From the details of costumes to the decoration of houses, material possessions play an essential part in the reciprocal shaping of dwellers and dwellings, and in the dramatization of a bygone splendor. Objects delineate and emblematize the magnificence of the drawing-rooms in which Marian and Myra exhibit themselves like precious jewels. Now, in her two novels, the writer also shows how things constantly alter the progression of the plots and the relationships between the characters. During the house parties at the Forresters’ or the Henshawes’, objects keep circulating among the hands of neighbors, friends, or lovers to weave clandestine alliances and rekindle the games of power, seduction and deception. In A Lost Lady as in My Mortal Enemy, Cather thus develops a theatrical and poetic play with and around things.

This article re-examines Willa Cather's short story ‘A Wagner Matinée’ (1904) as a complex text steeped in European debates about Richard Wagner's music dramas as well as American discourses about the composer's role in national culture. Criticism on the story – even while examining the psychology of narrator Clark, a cultivated Bostonian who takes his Nebraska aunt to an orchestral Wagner performance – has tended to accept his fundamental premise: the opposition between Wagner's aesthetic power and Nebraska's cultural vacuity. However, this reappraisal finds a narrative more ambivalent in its characterizations and more searching in its study of Wagner's significance, in regard to such issues as gender, sexuality, anti-Semitism, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and American national identity. ‘A Wagner Matinée’ floats on the stream of Wagnerism that ran through American modernity, and the text itself evolved as it ran that course, undergoing substantial revision as Cather's understanding of Wagner, and America, matured. Cather's struggle to square the ambiguities of Wagnerism with the ruptures of American experience is compacted into the story's dissonant modernist structure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The essay focuses on theories of education found in the work of American author and poet Willa Cather. The author explores how Cather's portrayal of education reflected the western spirit, examines how western institutions of higher education differed from their eastern counterparts at the turn of the 20th century, and discusses Cather's time spent studying at the University of Nebraska.

In 2010–2011, the Nebraska History Museum featured two temporary exhibits: “We the People: the Nebraskan Viewpoint” and “Willa Cather: A Matter of Appearances.” We argue the public memories of Brandon Teena and Willa Cather contained in the exhibits are distanced from regional politics when articulated alongside the nostalgic regionalist rhetoric of the Nebraska History Museum. Specifically, both exhibits not only discipline the memory of trans* performance within problematic material and symbolic contexts, but also place these memories within a rhetoric of regional optimism that has critical consequences for restricting counter-public formation. In performing this reading, the essay argues that critical regionalism has the potential to offer a nuanced perspective on the geopolitical dimensions of memory places by exploring understandings of the relationship between “local” and “national” commemoration at these sites. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A critique is presented of the book "The Professor's House" by Willa Cather, focusing on the use of music to encourage emotional awareness, specifically the opera "Mignon" by Ambroise Thomas. The character of Godfrey St. Peter is discussed, as well as themes of aging, memory, and displacement in both the book and the opera.

This article explores Willa Cather's erotic investment in melancholic seclusion. Her 1925 novel "The Professor's House" has been interpreted as an exemplary work showcasing the author's ambivalence about her closeted homoeroticism. Rather than seeing Cather's evasiveness about her own and her characters' sexuality as an indication of a backward sexual politics, however, I argue that it constitutes a refusal to participate in a bifurcated discourse of modern sexuality. The novel's representation of the protagonist's profound attachment to the quasi-closet that is his den disrupts an object-choice-based sexual binary by suggesting an erotics of the closet. When read in light of Sigmund Freud's and Julia Kristeva's ideas about melancholia, the professor's closet becomes not a symbol of repression, but a locus of a self-sufficient erotic economy of narcissism, whereby melancholic identification makes it possible for the subject to merge with a lost object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In ''The Marxist Sublime,'' Terry Eagleton argues that capitalist rationality has diminished the human ability to experience the aesthetic as bodily sensuousness. He advocates a Marxist reorganization of society as a means of reactivating the body's receptivity to pleasure by claiming that a ''revolution in thought'' might enable an existence defined by the omnipresence of aesthetic experience. Willa Cather's "The Professor's House" poses a significant challenge to such an idea. Through the novel's embedded narrative, ''Tom Outland's Story,'' Cather complicates the idealization of aesthetic life by demonstrating that the experience of loss is the structural heart of aesthetic response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the short story "Paul's Case" by Willa Cather and argues that the title character suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as well as narcissistic personality disorder. The signs of PTSD as described by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) are examined, and their manifestations in the character of Paul are explored.