This thesis explores the use of music in the literary works of author Willa Cather.

In Willa Cather's My Ántonia, nostalgia marks both the ambience of the novel and its critical focus. This thesis illuminates Cather's self-aware deployment of nostalgia as an artistic tool and nostalgia's role in Jim Burden's agenda-driven narrative. Jim adopts nostalgic narrative as propaganda to justify and glorify his past and present life, presenting his past as a simplified and romanticized origin myth. However, through the novel's frame narrative and the frequent, jarring vignettes of violence and discord, Cather undermines Jim's authority as a narrator and prompts reconsideration of Cather's endorsement of his nostalgic creation. By appreciating the complex deployment of nostalgia within the text we are prompted to reconsider assumptions about nostalgia, Cather, and Cather's interest in representations of the past.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2005. / Principal faculty advisor: Susan Goodman, Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references.

This project examines Cather’s experimentation with conflicting voices of narrative authority in the presentation of four central female characters in The Professor’s House, using St. Peter and an entity termed the implied narrator as lenses through which we view other characters. The project is broken down into four chapters, each dealing one addressing the central issues involving that specific female character.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 2003. Graduate Programme in English. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 326-348). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ82819.

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 90-92).

abstract: Libby Larsen is one of the most performed and acclaimed composers today. She is a spirited, compelling, and sensitive composer whose music enhances the poetry of America's most prominent authors. Notable among her works are song cycles for soprano based on the poetry of female writers, among them novelist and poet Willa Cather (1873-1947). Larsen has produced two song cycles on works from Cather's substantial output of fiction: one based on Cather's short story, "Eric Hermannson's Soul," titled Margaret Songs: Three Songs from Willa Cather (1996); and later, My Antonia (2000), based on Cather's novel of the same title. In Margaret Songs, Cather's poetry and short stories--specifically the character of Margaret Elliot--combine with Larsen's unique compositional style to create a surprising collaboration. This study explores how Larsen in these songs delves into the emotional and psychological depths of Margaret's character, not fully formed by Cather. It is only through Larsen's music and Cather's poetry that Margaret's journey through self-discovery and love become fully realized. This song cycle is a glimpse through the eyes of two prominent female artists on the societal pressures placed upon Margaret's character, many of which still resonate with women in today's culture. This study examines the work Margaret Songs by discussing Willa Cather, her musical influences, and the conditions surrounding the writing of "Eric Hermannson's Soul." It looks also into Cather's influence on Libby Larsen and the commission leading to Margaret Songs. Finally, a description of the musical, dramatic, and textual content of the songs completes this interpretation of the interactions of Willa Cather, Libby Larsen, and the character of Margaret Elliot. / Dissertation/Thesis / D.M.A. Music 2013

Thesis advisor: Marjorie E. Howes / This work applies current theories of affect to inform an understanding of the role of shame in the process of narration. It begins with a dual-sided hypothesis: experiences of humiliation and its consequence, shame, can initiate and mediate a narrative act, and the narrative process can immediately or over time mitigate and even eliminate the negative feelings of shame. The project particularly draws upon the pioneering affect theories of Silvan S. Tomkins to focus upon the life and written works of Willa Cather. It discovers and traces a poetics of shame as it occurs throughout the narratives she produced over a lifetime. It highlights how the Cathers’ forced migration from Virginia to Nebraska resulted in a loss of class and status as well as alterations in family dynamics. These disruptions created the foundations for her perceived humiliations and the shame that motivated her use of recurrent scenes, characters, narrative resolutions and even the very language she chose. This study emphasizes the usefulness of the application of affect studies for literary criticism and cultural studies. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Both overtly and subtly, the early twentieth century American author Willa Cather (1873-1947) gives her readers a sense of a spiritual realm in the world of her novels. '!'his study explores Cather's changing conceptions of spirituality and ways_in which she portrays them in three of her novels. I propose that though Cather is seldom considered a modernist, her interest in spirituality parallels Virginia Woolf's interest in moments of heightened consciousness, and that she invented ways to express ineffable connections with a spiritual dimension of life. In 0 Pioneers! (1913), Cather proposes that those who use their intuition to express themselves recognize and unite with a spiritual current that runs underneath and through all experience and natural phenomena. In The Professor's House (1925), Cather questions whether union with the spiritual current can endure, and doubts the ultimate value of such a union. In Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), she suggests that recognition of this spiritual current comes and goes, and resigns herself to the need for spiritual traditions, such as Catholicism, to be able to sustain belief in the current, to sense it, and to value a union with it. All her life, Cather searched for spiritual meaning, expressed in her interest in the philosopher Henri Bergson, in connections between art and religion, and in the Episcopal Church. Cather's conception of spirituality changes, but the spiritual dimension of her novels commonly includes a sense of space, place, transcendence and ambiguity. Because the spiritual realm is beyond words, Cather uses juxtaposition and repetition to create an expansive, imaginative space that resonates silently through her stories. Powerful landscapes express the spiritual realm, and enhance characters' ability to recognize it. Awareness of this realm allows characters to transcend mental and cultural barriers and experience a common consciousness. Cather embraces darkness and contradictions as part of the spiritual realm, resulting in powerful ambiguities. As her spiritual vision changes during her life from exuberant to deeply reserved, these ambiguities become increasingly highlighted in her novels.

It is the purpose of this thesis to select for examination the novels and short stories of Willa Cather which illustrate -thenature and outcome of the idealistic individual's struggle with his environment and from the evidence to discover what solution she saw to modern disillusionment.