Digital Commons Network^™

The Ideology Of Cather’S Catholic Progressivism: Death Comes For The Archbishop, Guy J. Reynolds

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Cather’s fiction about the Catholic mission in the Hispanic Southwest, is a historical novel, but one that approaches its subject in an elusive, teasing manner. The text incorporates the new primitivism, carrying with it a tolerant receptivity to Indian culture, racial heterogeneity, and Catholicism--all of which are aspects of American culture that narrow definitions of American progress would have excluded. Nonetheless, Cather cannot finally combine, incorporate, or reconcile her own perspectives on progress, and her open text shades into an evasive text