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"…a valuable asset to undergraduate students
of both history and literature…designed to invite young scholars to
mull Cather's themes of "the passage of time and the (healing)
power of memory" and to pursue knowledge about the places, eras,
and issues relevant to American culture."
Choice
(print)
"...bring issues presented in the novels, up to the present day,
highlighting the enduring relevance of the works. Most of the excerpts
are brief and accessible but also timely and interesting, making them
ideal for assignments"
School
Library Journal (print)
Willa Cather’s novels
O Pioneers! and My Antonia are at once accurate representations of life on the
Midwestern prairies in the era of their first settlement and continuations of a
literary tradition that stretches back to Virgil and other classical writers
who celebrated nature and pondered humanity’s place within it. Both novels are given full literary treatment here with close examination of the timeless
themes of love, loss, the transience of youth, and the influence of the land
itself on people’s lives. Students
and their teachers will find a wealth of
valuable information for their classroom discussions and research projects
in this interdisciplinary casebook.
Each topic chapter offers ideas for oral and written exploration as well
as lists of further suggested readings.
Students will not only gain a better understanding of Cather’s novels
here, but will be able to make
connections between their thematic concerns and contemporary social issues.
In addition, the online sourcebook provides the user access to:
- Willa Cather
Electronic Archive including chronology, biographies, works, photogallery and
images
- Prairie
Settlement: Nebraska Photographs and
Family Letters, 1862-1912: An extensive Library of Congress online collection
of several thousand pioneer photographs, documents and ephemera
- Interactive Prairie
Life: Thinking Exercises
- Pioneer Dwellings:Construction descriptions of pioneer dwellings and sod house photogallery
- The Northern Great
Plains Photograph Gallery, 1880-1920:
Over 900 photographs of rural and small town life at the turn of the
century, and images of sod homes, farms, machinery, and one-room schools
- E-Texts to O Pioneers!, My Antonia, The Song of the
Lark, History of the State of Nebraska, A History of Czechs (Bohemians) in
Nebraska, Bohemians in Nebraska, Swedes in Nebraska, The Adventures of Huck
Finn, Moby Dick, David Copperfield, The Confidence Man, The Last of the
Mohicans, The Prairie, “Pioneers O Pioneers”, Main-Travelled Roads, Mules and
Men, “The Gift Outright”, “Concord Hymn”, and others
- Prairie Schooner
Wagon Design
- Western America: Pioneers, Cowgirls, Wives: The history of women in the Western United
States
- Steel Rails and Iron
Horses: The History of the Railroad from the Bureau of Land Management
- Biographical sites on
Willa Cather, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain,
Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Adam Mickiewicz, Sarah
Orne Jewett, John Keats, Jay Gould, Ada Bittenbender, Albert Watkins, Hamlin
Garland, Richard Wright, John Steinbeck, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Robert Frost and others
- Glossary of cultural
references and historical idioms from Cather’s O Pioneers! and My Antonia
- Web-based study
questions
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