Despite the trajectories and implications Jim Burden may have imposed upon the female characters of My Antonia, each of the “hired girls” winds up successful by their own means, simultaneously demonstrating and defying the stereotypical roles of...

Willa Cather’s 1913 novel O Pioneers! is very much a work of its time, providing social commentary regarding a number of significant issues of the nineteenth into early twentieth century. This commentary presents a variety of frameworks for...

Much as the often-flooding rivers of Mesopotamia shaped their cultural beliefs in demons punishing humanity and the open grasslands and calm weather of central Asia shaped the Mongols’ cultural beliefs in the afterlife being the eternal blue sky,...

Life is full of restrictions and rules that can often impede one’s personal pursuit of happiness. In O Pioneers!, Willa Cather, explores the idea of limitations. The characters in Cather’s novel are restricted to the Nebraska prairie, but seek a...

Willa Cather’s romanticism shines through in all of her works highlighted in Great Books of the British and American Tradition. Readers today still credit her for helping a seemingly ordinary American landscape come to life in her short stories....

As part of human nature, the desire to want more has lead many to a path of self-destruction. By way of illustration, the main character in “Paul’s Case” by Willa Cather, Paul, has an obsession with a more luxurious lifestyle fueling his negative...

Joint critiques of modern materialism and the resulting void in the life of the everyday man, Willa Cather’s Neighbor Rosicky and Eudora Welty’s Death of a Traveling Salesman illuminate the modernist dilemma of isolation through the characters of...