Cather Studies 4 contains eighteen essays and elaborates a theme, ?Willa Cather?s Canadian and Old World Connections.? Such connections are central to Cather?s art and artistry. She transported much from the Old World to the New, shaping her antecedents to tell, in new ways, the stories of Nebraska, of the American Southwest, and especially of Quebec, in Shadows on the Rock. ø David Stouck details Cather?s numerous Canadian connections, Richard Millington treats her ?anthropological? re-creation of the cultural moment of seventeenth-century Quebec, and Franöois Palleau-Papin finds ?The Hidden French in Cather?s English.? A volume of lively and informed criticism, Cather Studies 4 vividly demonstrates Cather?s artistry and her work?s deep connections to the present cultural and critical moment.

Music is everywhere in Willa Cather's fiction: as a subject, in the background, slyly commenting on the action, connecting characters to a distant world, or revealing their interior worlds. Not merely incidental or ornamental, though, music is intrinsic to Cather's work, a distinctive quality of her creation and expression, and it is in this light that Richard Giannone considers Cather's art. Music in Willa Cather's Fiction is the definitive study of its subject. The first work to examine the complex thematic and structural forms that music acquires in Cather's narratives, Giannone's book uses this musical approach as a way of seeing into the author's artistic sensibility, the evolution of her art, and her total achievement. ø Progressing chronologically, Giannone shows how Cather's view and use of music changed over time. From what her early journalistic pieces on music and musicians reveal about her attitude and anticipate in her later work, Giannone moves to Cather's early stories to identify the trend of some of her artistic choices, the direction of her stylistic development, and the complication of her moral interest as these are manifested in musical references. In her novels and later stories, he emphasizes the contribution of music to the individual work, as well as the allusions and connections that sound throughout her oeuvre.

A Study Guide for Willa Cather's "A Wagner Matinee," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

Willa Cather's Transforming Vision: New France and the American Northeast explores Cather's search for meaning and a domestic center, in particular as her search was influenced by her feelings for New France and the American Northeast. Including biography, critical overview, and primary research into both Cather's writing and some of her most unusual historical sources, this study focuses on Shadows on the Rock, while incorporating this pivotal novel into the larger pattern of Cather's growing need for belonging and order. Shadows on the Rock, set in the city of Quebec ("Kebec") at the end of the seventeenth century, is Cather's fullest expression of love for French culture and its adaptation to New World soil. But more than a mere extolling of what Mme. Auclair in Shadows proudly calls "our way" - a skill with all things domestic that, she boasts, renders the French "the most civilized people in Europe" - this novel is a statement of faith in the ability of both individuals and larger societal orders to work together for the creation of an all-encompassing whole. Writing at mid-life, after the recent illnesses and deaths of her parents, Cather could posit in her story of New France a familial order much larger than the domestic heart of her earlier masterpiece, My Antonia. In all of Quebec, as in the incomplete but fruitful home of the widowed apothecary Euclide Auclair and his daughter Cecile, life is sustained by a merging of gender and social roles, as a bishop can become the symbolic head of an entire church as well as of a troubled family, and a bellicose count can play as warm and nurturing a role as the gentlest of parents.

A Study Guide for "Willa Cather's O Pioneers!" excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literary Themes for Students: The American Dream.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Literary Themes for Students: The American Dream for all of your research needs.

A Study Guide for Willa Cather's "My Antonia," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

Diploma Thesis from the year 2001 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: Sehr gut, University of Vienna, language: English, abstract: America’s collective memory rests on mythic regions: the planter’s South, the Puritan’s East, and the pioneer’s West. It is the latter which covers a genuinely American experience. For almost three hundred years the westward expansion determined the nation’s thought and action. Millions of pioneers were pouring into the Great West. By settling the country those people brought civilization to the wilderness. Their efforts at cultivating the virgin land helped to transform the prairie region into an agricultural empire. The pioneer age had a great influence on American history and its spirit was a vital factor in the formation of the national character. The effects of the frontier heritage are still strongly felt in American society and culture. As one of the three mythic regions, the pioneer’s West forms an integral part of America’s identity today. Willa Cather made her contribution to it in literature. Often regarded as among the best imaginative accounts of frontier life in American letters, O Pioneers! (1913), My Ántonia (1918), and A Lost Lady (1923) demonstrate Cather’s poetic responses to the prairie West. These three novels illustrate her adaptation of the pioneering theme to the Great Plains region and reveal her preoccupation with history, memory, and identity on a national, regional, and individual scale. Their stories reflect her creative use of the popular myth of the frontier and the literary figure of the pioneer. As a rule, the novelist presents pioneer characters against a Nebraska background and places them at the centre of collective and private conflicts. Her artistic imagination turns to aspects usually left out from celebrations of the frontier experience in the rural West.