Cather, Willa - Erik Ingvar Thurin (essay date 1990)

Erik Ingvar Thurin (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: Thurin, Erik Ingvar. The Humanization of Willa Cather: Classicism in an American Classic, pp. 94–158, 320–30, 355–63. Sweden: Lund University Press, 1990.

[In the following excerpt, Thurin presents an overview of Cather's debt to classical Greek and Latin literature in her short stories.]

FROM BOLDNESS TO CONFORMITY

The narrative technique that was to allow Cather to express herself both fully and adequately was not developed in a day. The stories to be discussed … all belong to a long exploratory apprenticeship which Cather served as a writer of fiction, roughly the period ending with the publication of her first novel.1 A number of them were written during the time she was working as a journalist and composing her first poems; others are contemporary with the poems specifically written for the 1903 April Twilights, or those which she wrote or drafted during...

[The entire page is 45840 words long]

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