Although Cather has long been dwarfed by such figures as F. Scott Fitzgerald in terms of scholarly attention, in recent years her work has become the focus of some researchers. An article by Enrique Lima in the journal Novel: A Forum on Fiction (known for its emphasis on the historical novel and history in the novel), titled "Willa Cather's Rewriting of the Historical Novel in Death Comes for the Archbishop," takes a look at Cather's focus on history in the form of the everyday, as opposed to dramatic, ruptures.
Lima argues that, unlike her predecessors like Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, Cather depicted history as a quiet accumulation of long culture histories, rather than as revolutions that shocked characters and the general public into historical awareness. This focus on the everyday, in the form of Father Latour's interest in gardening and cooking (and, a highly important element that Lima neglects to mention, the many stories that Father Latour picks up during his missionary travels across New Mexico, either through personal experience or hearsay), has the potential for giving greater value to the Native American and Mexican cultures the novel depicts.
However, Lima points out a contradiction in Cather's cultural and historical imagination, as represented in Father Latour: the priest seems to see European modernization as the only way to participate in the movement of history, with the consequence that the Native Americans who do not convert to European ways are considered to fall outside of history. Although this contradiction does not lend itself to a clear solution, it demonstrates that Cather's fiction has proven to be a fertile ground for thinking through contemporary problems of fictional representation of history and the notion of the historical itself.
