Willa Cather's My Antonia

Willa Cather's my Ántonia

A Winters Journey

« The best thing I've done is My Ántonia. I feel I've made a contribution to American letters with that book," confided Willa Cather to one of her childhood friends in 1938. What was it that made such an apparently simple, artless novel one of the landmarks of American literature ? Willa Cather's My Antonia : A Winter's Journey offers both a wide-ranging synopsis of the existing scholarship and new insights into the novel that established Cather's reputation. This book successively places My Antonia in its biographical, historical, and political contexts, examines the various literary traditions in which it can be situated, throws light upon questions of form, structure, and point of view, addresses the tension between « figures » and « pictures » as well as between time and space that informs Cather's approach, and probes into the multilayered complexity of a novel whose unreliable narrator proves to be not only a divided self but also a tormented soul on a quest for absolutes.