The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's RomanticismUniversity of Nebraska Press, 1986 - 284 pagina's They Voyage Perilous is the first extended interpretation of Willa Cather's writing within the literary tradition of romanticism. Although she partook of the familiar subjects and themes of the Wordsworthian school of romanticism, Cather was not nearly so concerned with what we see as how we see. Her intensely individual perspective, more creatively romantic than has been previously recognized, gave her work its own kind of elegant form.
Susan J. Rosowski argues that Willa Cather early took up the romantic challenge to vindicate imaginative thought in a world threatened by materialism, then pursued it with remarkable consistency throughout her career. The early essays and stories set out the terms of this life-long commitment. In the early novels Cather celebrates imaginative possibilities; in the middle ones she present increasingly desperate circumstances, asking what is left when the imagination is eclipsed by commercial values; in the late novels she writes in a Gothic mode, the dark counterspirit to optimistic romanticism.
The book is organized chronologically, with a chapter devoted to each novel. The chapters can be read independently or as part of a unified argument providing a larger picture. |
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... action - all have only the slightest concern with circumstantial reality . St. Peter's study , the major setting of the book , is only incidentally a scholar's study which contains a dressmaker's dummies . These " forms " ( Cather's ...
... Action too presents engulfment , imaged in a series of metaphorical drownings : the young Nelly's breaking through the ice while skating , her dis- appearing beneath the dark water of her baptism , and her dying by complications of the ...
... action . But this , too , is characteristic of the Gothic , the " proper plot " of which is " a series of intertwined stories held together by some loose uni- fying pattern , for the looseness enables the essential effect of suddenness ...
Inhoudsopgave
The Discovered Self | 3 |
O Pioneers Willa Cathers New World Pastoral | 45 |
The Growth of an Artists Mind | 62 |
Copyright | |
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