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Cather, Willa My Antonia ISBN 13: 9781614271628

My Antonia - Softcover

 
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2011 Reprint of 1918 Edition. "My Ántonia" was enthusiastically received in 1918 when it was first published. It was considered a masterpiece and placed Cather in the forefront of women novelists. Today it is considered her first masterpiece. Cather was praised for bringing the American West to life in her fiction and for making it personally engaging for the reader. It also served to promote regional American literature as an important part of mainstream literature. While interpretations vary, "My Ántonia" is clearly an elegy to those families who built new lives west of the Mississippi River and highlights the role of women pioneers in particular. Cather also makes a number of comments concerning her views on women's rights and some interpreters have suggested the use of disguised sexual metaphors in the text. It remains a classic text in American literature.

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Review:
It seems almost sacrilege to infringe upon a book as soulful and rich as Willa Cather's My Ántonia by offering comment. First published in 1918, and set in Nebraska in the late 19th century, this tale of the spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family planning to farm on the untamed land ("not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made") comes to us through the romantic eyes of Jim Burden. He is, at the time of their meeting, newly orphaned and arriving at his grandparents' neighboring farm on the same night her family strikes out to make good in their new country. Jim chooses the opening words of his recollections deliberately: "I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to be an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America," and it seems almost certain that readers of Cather's masterpiece will just as easily pinpoint the first time they heard of Ántonia and her world. It seems equally certain that they, too, will remember that moment as one of great light in an otherwise unremarkable trip through the world.

Ántonia, who, even as a grown woman somewhat downtrodden by circumstance and hard work, "had not lost the fire of life," lies at the center of almost every human condition that Cather's novel effortlessly untangles. She represents immigrant struggles with a foreign land and tongue, the restraints on women of the time (with which Cather was very much concerned), the more general desires for love, family, and companionship, and the great capacity for forbearance that marked the earliest settlers on the frontier.

As if all this humanity weren't enough, Cather paints her descriptions of the vastness of nature--the high, red grass, the road that "ran about like a wild thing," the endless wind on the plains--with strokes so vivid as to make us feel in our bones that we've just come in from a walk on that very terrain ourselves. As the story progresses, Jim goes off to the University in Lincoln to study Latin (later moving on to Harvard and eventually staying put on the East Coast in another neat encompassing of a stage in America's development) and learns Virgil's phrase "Optima dies ... prima fugit" that Cather uses as the novel's epigraph. "The best days are the first to flee"--this could be said equally of childhood and the earliest hours of this country in which the open land, much like My Ántonia, was nothing short of a rhapsody in prairie sky blue. --Melanie Rehak

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  • PublisherMartino Fine Books
  • Publication date2011
  • ISBN 10 1614271623
  • ISBN 13 9781614271628
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages184
  • Rating

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780486282404: My Ántonia (Dover Thrift Editions)

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ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780486282404
Publisher: Dover Publications, 1994
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    Oxford..., 2009
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  • 9780525562863: My Antonia: Introduction by Jane Smiley (Vintage Classics)

    Vintage, 2018
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  • 9781509899784: My Ántonia

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Book Description Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. nach der Bestellung gedruckt Neuware - Printed after ordering - 2011 Reprint of 1918 Edition. 'My Ántonia' was enthusiastically received in 1918 when it was first published. It was considered a masterpiece and placed Cather in the forefront of women novelists. Today it is considered her first masterpiece. Cather was praised for bringing the American West to life in her fiction and for making it personally engaging for the reader. It also served to promote regional American literature as an important part of mainstream literature. While interpretations vary, 'My Ántonia' is clearly an elegy to those families who built new lives west of the Mississippi River and highlights the role of women pioneers in particular. Cather also makes a number of comments concerning her views on women's rights and some interpreters have suggested the use of disguised sexual metaphors in the text. It remains a classic text in American literature. 184 pp. Englisch. Seller Inventory # 9781614271628

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Book Description N/D. Condition: New. 1. 2011 Reprint of 1918 Edition. "My Ántonia" was enthusiastically received in 1918 when it was first published. It was considered a masterpiece and placed Cather in the forefront of women novelists. Today it is considered her first masterpiece. Cather was praised for bringing the American West to life in her fiction and for making it personally engaging for the reader. It also served to promote regional American literature as an important part of mainstream literature. While interpretations vary, "My Ántonia" is clearly an elegy to those families who built new lives west of the Mississippi River and highlights the role of women pioneers in particular. Cather also makes a number of comments concerning her views on women\'s rights and some interpreters have suggested the use of disguised sexual metaphors in the text. It remains a classic text in American literature. - Libro bajo demanda. Seller Inventory # 1614271623

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