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Disturbing The Ecological Pastoral: An Examination Of Willa Cather's Fictional Spaces In My Ántonia And Death Comes For The Archbishop, Anne Carter Stowe

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Willa Cather is universally lauded for her ability to render landscape into prose. Critics have observed for years that the landscape often functions as the main character in her fiction, or that her characters can easily be evaluated in terms of how deep and successful their relationships to the land are. In an attempt to evaluate Cather’s treatment of two different “Western” landscapes, I will focus first on My Ántonia, one of her most famous Nebraska novels, and second on Death Comes for the Archbishop, whose narrative unravels on the New Mexican landscape. I argue that Cather treats …