(David Stouck, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver American Literary Scholarship) impressive, painstakingly researched.She compellingly argues that Cather incorporates elements of preclassical and classical mystery religions to locate the history of the frontier in a context of universal significance. (David Stouck, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver CHOICE) Hively positions Cather in the context of the 'fundamental philosophies that have been the basis for thought in Western history.'> (Guy Reynolds, AMERICAN STUDIES CHOICE)Ī splendid study of Cather's major works fulfilling the promise of those illuminating studies of Cather and myth that the author published several years ago.coherent, original, and in places startling to someone who already knows a lot about Cather. Contents: Acknowledgments Introduction THE LAW BEHIND THE VEIL Cather's Novel Cycle Vichian Philosophy The Mystery Religions PRAIRIE DAWN: THE AGE OF GODS O Pioneers! The Song of the Lark My Antonia THE MEMORY OF OUR VANISHED KINGDOM: THE AGE OF HEROES One of Ours A Lost Lady IN MEDIA VITA: THE AGE OF MEN The Professor's House My Mortal Enemy WITH ATTRIBUTES OF GODS: RICORSO Death Comes for the Archbishop Shadows on the Rock SOMETHING COMPLETE AND GREAT Notes Bibliography Index. Documentation here relies much on earlier critics, many of them contemporaries of Cather who, more often than do the modern critics, comment on the nationalist and religious themes of the novels. The third level is religion, specifically the mystery religions that pervaded that Roman world and marked the early stages of civilization. The second level relates to Vico's theory that language follows and adapts to succeeding periods of civilization's cycle and that genre, a convention of language, has a connection with a particular age, expressing a relationship to the world view of the time. First, it postulates a cyclical design, beginning with O Pioneers! and ending with Shadows on the Rock, which traces a rise, maturity, and fall of the civilization of the American West, and presents a new beginning in the final books.
Hively's study combines Cather's interest in the historians, the philosophers, and the mythographers, to examine nine of her novels on three levels. This book examines Willa Cather's conceptions through her numerous works.
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