Abstract
Willa Cather’s famous Virgilian epigraphy toMy Ántonia alerts the reader to the novel’s deep engagement with theGeorgics. This paper advocates a positive interpretation of the relationship between the two by exploring the role of the poem in the life and “memoirs” of Jim Burden, the novel’s narrator. In contrast, to currently received notions about the poem’s “pastoralizing” influence, it argues that theGeorgics illumines the Nebraska prairie and the farmers who toiled there, enabling Jim to perceive and articulate, their vitality and worth. Through Jim’s story of remenbrance and return, Cather utimately presents the literary tradition, and theGeorgics in particular, as a beneficent force capable of creating connections among human beings, the natural world, the past and present.
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Additional information
I remain grateful to William R. Macnaughton for his advice on the original version of this essay, a portion of which was presented at the 1997 Interdisciplinary Symposium of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. I would also like to thank the Killam Trusts for the postdoctoral fellowship that enabled me to expand and refine my ideas, as well as Wolfgang Haase and the anonymous readers forIJCT who helped make this a stronger paper.
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Simons, K. Re-making the georgic connection: Virgil and Cather’sMy Ántonia . Int class trad 7, 523–540 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02688455
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02688455