Willa Cather's Turns

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2007

Abstract

Examining Willa Cather's corpus of literary works reveals several phases of her illustrious career. After defending commercial culture in O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, her later novels, especially her One of Ours, diagnose an unmediated split in the Western world illustrated by the experience of the Great War: the bourgeois commercial culture undermines aspirations for human greatness. Her later novels deepen this diagnosis and offer a way out in a return to a rooted community of believers living in the shadows of the Church.

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