Geonarrative In Willa Cather's Novels

The American west as represented by Willa Cather,along with Yoknapatawpha by William Faulkner,the Mississippi by Mark Twain,Winesburg by Sherwood Anderson,and the rural New England by Robert rrost,constitutes the most remarkable spatial domain in the 20th century American literature.Literary geography,as a novel critical approach.proves congruent with Cather's creative features and hence sheds new light on her arts of fiction.As a new theory of literary criticism,literary geocriticism is an interdisciplinary criticism hybridizing literature and geography.It takes physical spaces as its research object and focuses on aesthetic and intentional construction of landscapes and places in geonarrative of the text.Criticism follows a process from aesthetic perception to aesthetic judgement,finally to spatial relationship analysis,and it's also a process of from physical to metaphysical.Literary geocriticism overcomes spatial criticism's shortcoming which depends on abstract signifying research,ignores subjective experiences of places.It pays more attention to the diversity of spatial experience under the contextuality,shows a close relationship with literature.The dissertation focuses on Willa Cather's novels in her early,middle,and late stages,examines geonarrative in her texts against their social context and literary tradition,with an aim to explore their distinct aesthetic qualities and implications.First,the dissertation investigate the social context and artistic trends that weigh on Cather's literary creation,the formation of her own writing principles under these influences,and the sources of her inspirations and conceptions of fictions.Then,based on textual analysis,the dissertation employs critical methods of literary geocriticism to illustrate the devices of geographic narrative in Cather's novels,focusing on the geographic imageries,geographic narratives,and spatial metaphors or symbols that imply and convey thematic meanings.Third,centering on geographic narrative,an exploration is given to artistical expression of novels' themes.Last,the dissertation summarizes the author's distinctive aesthetic features and dominant poetic orientations in her different stages,followed by a differentiation of aesthetic values.The Preface presents a review of Willa Cather studies and literary geocriticism in general,and a clarification of core concepts of geocriticism in particular,then makes commments on the pertinency,feasibility,and innovation of the approach.The principal part,in accordance with Cather's three major writing periods,falls into three chapters.Chapter One focuses on the "Nebraska Series".These fictions represent the identity development of European immigrants in the process of Americanization,and their pioneering spirit and imagination of an American community in the process.The motif of pioneering in Nebraska turns out to be the key to the success of these novels,hence Willa Cather is dubbed a "regionalist" American archetypes,such as wilderness narratives,garden narratives,and classical spectacles,are successively localized in these fictions as Nebraska's.The representation of American history via local stories parallels metaphysically the elevation from local color to human existential space,a trope for the relationship between human beings and the world.Chapter Two targets the "Crisis Series".In close succession to the "Nebraska Series",the "Crisis Series" characterize psychological dislocation in the social transformation from "frontierism" to"mercantilism,where the human-place relationship goes astray,a state of rootless in space in which it is impossilbe to reconstruct the past or accep the present.The novels render the spatial shift from wilderness to urbanization,and the transgression and even self exile of the homeless characters,in order to foreground the consequent modernity problemtics like confusion,rupture,and alienation.Geonarrative usually adopts such devices as double or multiple space parallelism or juxtapositon,with characterizaiton dynamically generated in juxtaposed or parallel spaces,or in charaters' encountering with locations.The setting is not pictured for its own sake,but situated as part and parcel of characters and plots.Geographic images are structured around core imagery like houses into a symbolic imagery group,in service of the thematic expression.Chapter Three concentrates on the "Historical Novels".These late period fictions tell about French missionaries' understanding and fusion with the local culture in southwest American frontiers,and about the early French immigrants' reconstruction of local communities in Quebec.A sacred space is constructed by recourse to religious and traditional culture in defining human-geography relationship,and everyday life aestheticized with resort to fusion of horizons between the holy and the profane space.The late stage also creates a new pattern known as "decentered episodes".Inspired by fresco and woodcut,this new type of fictions juxtaposes an array of scenes and unfolds stories in a way of folding screens,with mood and atmosphere overshadowing plot development and interrupting narration.The repsentation of landscapes is based on the hybridzation of the real and the symbolic,with a great quantity of omissions and gaps filled with spatial metaphors and symbols.In this way,themes,feelings,and motives are merged in symbolic spaces as integral of concrete situations.Conclusion is a summary of Willa Cather's geonarrative arts,arguing that geonarrative is not merely a narrative means in her fiction creation,but manifests ontological values.