Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather are often mentioned together as traditionalists, the supposition being that their common interest was inspired by similar forces; all women, all of the same era, all greatly appreciative of many of the same values, and all doing most of their outstanding work during their middle and late years. It has become a convenience of criticism and scholarship to consider authors as belonging to certain schools. It has also been a convenience to study the origins of these schools as social phenomena having more to do with a direction of society as a whole than with individual psychological forces within each author. Such an approach may be adequate for a movement that rises to its apex and dwindles to a shadow all within one generation--as did the extreme Naturalism of Norris--, but it is not sufficient for traditionalism which has repeated itself several times throughout literary history. It is, therefore, the purpose of this study to investigate the lives and works of Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather in order to demonstrate the different forces tending each towards vastly different tradition-influenced work, specifically novels. In such treatment, each author can be presented individually in a brief biographical study, and then her novels can be discussed with her own psychological framework and the whole field of traditionalism kept in mind as a balance. The emphasis here will be upon the diverse influences in their lives and the extremely varied work these differences motivated. Traditionalism will not be exactly defined because this paper has been undertaken with the hope of broadening rather than limiting the concept of "traditionalism." It is the intention here to investigate and evaluate both the intent and extent of the various degrees and elements of traditionalism as they appear in the bulk of these authors' novels.

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This thesis explores the citation of documents in the modernist novel. From contracts to newspaper articles, telegrams to reports, documents are invoked as interleaved texts in ways that, to date, have not been critically interrogated. I consider a range of novels, including works by Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, and Willa Cather, which are selected, in part, as a litmus of Anglo-American modernism, though they can more productively also be understood as coalescing around the example set by Joseph Conrad. Replete with allusions to documents, Conrad’s oeuvre is developed across the thesis as a meta-commentary on the document in modernist literature. In placing the document at the centre of analysis, and in using Conrad as a diagnostic of the document in modernity, the manifold ways in which authors use interpolated texts to perform denotative and connotative “work” in their narratives emerge, with the effect of revising our understanding of documents. These authors reveal the power of mass produced documents to lay claim to novelistic language; the historical role of documents in reifying inequality; on the level of narrative, the thematic potential of the document as a reiterable text; and finally, the capacity of the document, in its most depersonalized form, to realize social collectivity and community. This project therefore asks us to rethink and relocate the document as central to the modernist novel.

This thesis explores the role played by narrative desire within two modernist experimentations with novel form: Willa Cather's 1918 novel My Antonia and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936). In it, I argue that Cather and Faulkner utilize framing narratives in order to present the main plot of each novel as a product of multiple narrators' desire for a story to emerge. In My Antonia, it is the expressed wish of Jim Burden's nameless writer friend that compels him to finish writing his account of Antonia, which constitutes the main plot of the novel. Meanwhile, in Absalom, Absalom! it is Quentin's perception that Rosa "wants it told" which inspires him to investigate and reconstruct her ex-fiancee Thomas Sutpen's life story with the help of two other character-narrators: his father and college roommate Shreve. Calling on narrative theory and psychoanalysis, I argue that Cather's and Faulkner's novels depict characters' desire for both storytelling and each other to be enigmatic and intersubjective. Indeed the impulse to generate narrative on the part of the tellers in both texts--notably Jim and Quentin--is seen to arise out of a partial, but not entirely clear, sense that another wants them to do so. In other words, the narrative desire conveyed by the nameless writer and Rosa appears to have no clear object. While it is understood by Jim and Quentin that a story is desired of them, the full extent of what this story might come to be about is never fully explicated by their interlocutors. Theoretically, the intervention this project wagers by way of Cather and Faulkner is a rethinking of two influential attempts to bring together narrative theory and psychoanalysis: Peter Brooks' Reading for the Plot (1984) and Judith Roof's Come As You Are (1996). While the claims regarding narrative advanced by both Brooks and Roof rely primarily on Freud's work (notably his theories of the death drive and of sexual development), I attempt to demonstrate how Lacan's thinking allows us to understand narrative as issuing from a desire that is at once intersubjective and objectless--as appears to be the case in My Antonia and Absalom, Absalom!. Lacan's dynamic conceptualization of desire, I suggest, is not only essential to understanding these two works; it is also very much implicit within the interplay of desire and narrative form they establish.

Willa Cather (1873-1947) is nowadays regarded as one of the most important U.S. writers, and the volume of critical works, articles and dissertations devoted to her as a person and an artist is immense. One of the problematic relationship has always been, as can be seen from a number of critical essays and books, between Cather and U.S. feminists. The feminists would have liked to include Cather, as an feminist writer, into their group of the first-rate, woman-authored "female canon", however, such intent brought about an important question. Is it possible to regard Willa Cather as a feminist, considering her attacks on other women-writers, and her negative attitude towards the organized women's rights movement? This work's objective is to explore the background of Cather and organized women's rights movement's bizarre relationship, and answer the question above. To find out if Cather's work with its strong heroines empowered or weakened women in general, her novels and stories, rather then facts and assumption about her personal life, are used. The relevant parts of the plots from Cather's fiction are put into the historical perspective of the contemporary U.S. laws, showing that although Cather created exceptional woman characters, she let them deal with the same conditions and problems other...

Although Willa Cather's My Antonia and Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs have been highly regarded by numerous literary critics, neither text conforms to conventional expectations for narrative content or structure. Episodic in construction, the novels lack such traditional narrative ingredients as conflict, action, drama, and romance. Furthermore, explicit connections between episodes and stories related within the narratives are not drawn for the reader. Formalist and structuralist critics have approached the problem of structure in Cather and Jewett's works by employing conventional literary tools of analysis, by "unearthing" the narrative elements that we as readers and critics have come to expect: identifiable structure, a plot complete with conflict and resolution, and characters that develop. Likewise, many feminist critics have sought to uncover in Cather and Jewett's work the ideal elements for a woman's text such as the employment of a feminine method of writing. Unfortunately, both approaches utilize interpretive templates that would pin down meaning and thus "solve" the texts' seeming peculiarities. Instead of prescribing structure according to accepted conventions or ideals, this study attempts to describe the narrative construction of My Antonia and The Country of the Pointed Firs. I argue that these texts are not structures in a traditional linear fashion, but rather are "conversations" among a variety of "readers" -the narrator, other characters, and the actual readers of the text - who attempt to construct an understanding of the world around them, or the meaning of the overall story. The chapters in this thesis explore this dialogue present in Cather and Jewett's work; the various participating, as well as their proposed constructions. Both Cather and Jewett, through their innovative narrative techniques, dramatize the human need to make sense of life, our capacity to create meaning, and at the same time the fallibility of such constructions. By employing a form which resists conventional strategies of explanation, Cather and Jewett encourage an interpretative approach that favors cumulative readings, a certain responsiveness, and an allowance for indeterminacy.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 265-284).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: Susan Goodman & Carl Dawson, Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references.

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