American fiction, 1865-1940 by Lee Brian

Author:Lee, Brian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: American fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism, American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism
Publisher: Longman

for a purer type of fiction that would throw out all the ‘social furniture’ with which it had been cluttered since Balzac’s time. In her own later work, and even in that written before this critical moment, she succeeded well enough to convince many critics that she was really more of a lyric poet than a novelist. In the same essay, she even rejected the whole world of‘physical sensation’, as well as the banking system and the Stock Exchange, so that if one were to define realism in terms of subject-matter, her place in this chapter would certainly be open to doubt. If, on the other hand, the possibility of treating the spiritual life realistically is conceded, then her inclusion here is legitimate. And even if such a claim seems insubstantial, her evocation of the land, whether it is the Nebraska prairies of O Pioneers (1913) and My Antonia , or the south-western deserts of her later work, these sources of spiritual value in her world cannot be dismissed as metaphoric projections or mythic landscapes. She herself had grown up in Nebraska during the period she preferred to describe, the 1880s, at a time when the land was barely settled, and her descriptions of farms and small communities come from her most important and ineradicable memories.

Like other Midwestern writers, Willa Cather had at first attempted to escape the narrowness and dullness of her early environment. She was not immune to the restlessness of small-town existence which she describes so well and, tantalized by the glimpses of European history and culture provided by her cosmopolitan neighbours, she eventually arrived in New York. She pursued a successful career as a journalist and produced a volume of short stories called The Troll Garden (1905), and a novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912), before returning to the past for material that would sustain the fiction of her middle period. An important influence at this time which affected her decision to reject the ‘studio picture’ writing of her Jamesian period, was that of Sarah Orne Jewett, who advised her to find her ‘own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world ... to the human heart’. 11

While it is not a distortion of the truth to see Willa Cather as yet another in a procession of American artists ‘who have gone down to defeat before the actualities of American life’, Lionel Trilling’s observation needs more qualification than he provides by blaming American life itself and placing her in very distinguished company. 12 It is true that the refuges she sought from the petty, crass materialism of the present - first the sanctuary of art and later that of Roman Catholicism - did not always provide sufficient space or serenity to counter her petulant anti-modernism. But between these she discovered in Nebraska her great subject, and in the lives of the pioneers found a great theme to erect on it.

O Pioneers was her first work in the new mode and it is not entirely

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.