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Middlebrow Readers And Pioneer Heroines: Willa Cather’S My Ántonia, Bess Streeter Aldrich’S A Lantern In Her Hand, And The Popular Fiction Market, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Along with repositioning Cather in a new reading context, this essay aims to bring Aldrich and her novel into literary history (and college classrooms) by putting her work into dialogue with Cather’s. I do not, however, elevate Aldrich to the status of elite artist, a move that she herself would disavow. Instead, I seek to revalue the middlebrow as a mode of authorship, circulation, and reading for the literary history of the American West and to place Ántonia and Lantern together on that oft-scorned terrain. When Aldrich is taken note of in Western literary history, she receives only glancing attention …