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My ántonia6/11/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In this intention, she is akin to her modernist contemporaries (especially Pound and Eliot) despite her surface-level smoothness and realism. Willa Cather’s 1918 novel, My Ántonia, places itself in the history of world literature about two-thirds of the way through, when its narrator, Jim Burden, goes to college and contemplates the career of Virgil:Īfter he had faced the bitter fact that he was to leave the Aeneid unfinished, and had decreed that the great canvas, crowded with figures of gods and men, should be burned rather than survive him unperfected, then his mind must have gone back to the perfect utterance of the Georgics, where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow and he must have said to himself, with the thankfulness of a good man, “I was the first to bring the Muse into my country.”ĭisclaiming epic heroism, modeling poetry on manual labor, consecrating in pastoral literature a new patria, Cather announces her desire to go beyond mere regionalism or local color writing, like that of her mentor Sarah Orne Jewett, and inaugurate instead an austere American classicism. ![]()
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