Author, Subjects, Keywords

Cited Author

 
 
   » By Author or Editor
 » Browse Author by Alphabet
 » By Journal
 » By Subjects
 » Malaysian Journals
 » By Type
 » By Year
 » By Latest Additions
 
 
   » By Author
 » Top 20 Authors
 » Top 20 Article
 » Top Journal Cited
 » Top Article Cited
 » Journal Citation Statistics
 » Usage Since Sept 2007


 
 
 

Login | Create Account

A glance of Amazonian fierceness point of view as a feminist and mythological tool in Willa Cather's western novels

Liew, Christine Ching Ling, (2006) A glance of Amazonian fierceness point of view as a feminist and mythological tool in Willa Cather's western novels. SARE (Southeast Asian Review of English) (47). pp. 37-59. ISSN 0127-046X

[img]
Preview
PDF (Full Text) - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader
274Kb

Affiliations

Universiti Sains Malaysia, Centre for Languages and Translation

Abstract

The eminent American writer Willa Cather was an avid reader and researcher of mythology. She believed that mythology formed the basis of life; that without myths to sustain us, we would not find true meaning in our lives. Mythology was
also important for Cather as it is an acknowledgement of our past and heritage, which we carry as our baggage as we move on in life. However, it is crucial to understand that though Cather values mythology, she is very much aware of its fallibility and capability for biasness. She does not merely stick to the traditional ways in which mythology is propagated in society. On the contrary, Cather dares
to experiment with the whole idea of mythology itself.

There are two aspects of Cather's experimentation that must be taken into account here. Firstly, she uses classical mythology to resist another type of mythology: the mythology of the American frontier as found in the genre of the Western novel. This then leads to the subtle but no less empowering aspect of using existing mythology to create a new kind of mythology. In doing so, she is not erasing the mythology that already exists, but she is providing alternative mythologies for us to consider. Her strong conviction that mythology is a crucial part of humanity is connected with her belief that the mythology and myths that exist today are products of the male consciousness. With that, her experimentation with mythology strives to provide space for mythologies that are of and from the female consciousness to coexist with the ones we have now. As she also believed that myths have the capability to promote universality, thus it is only fair that the female be allowed to voice out other universalities other than the ones proposed by existing myths.

Item Type:Journal
Keywords:Willa Cather, Mythology, Western novel, English fiction, History and criticism
Subjects:P Language and Literature
ID Code:10027

Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.

Armitage, Susan H. "Women's Literature and the American Frontier: A New Perspective on the Frontier Myth." Women, Women Writers and the West.

Eds. L. L. Lee and Merrill Lewis. New York: Whitson Pub. Co., 1979. 5-14.

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1963.

Booth, Wayne C. "My Antonia." Early Novels and Stories. Ed. Sharon O'Brien. New York: The Library of America, 1987.

Booth, Wayne C. "0 Pioneers!" Early Novels and Stories. Ed. Sharon O'Brien. New York: The Library of America, 1987.

Booth, Wayne C. "The Song of the Lark." Early Novels and Stories. Ed. Sharon O'Brien. New York: The Library of America, 1987.

Cook, Albert. Myth and Language. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.

Dubek, Laura. "Rewriting Male Scripts: Willa Cather and The Song of the Lark." Women's Studies 23 (1994): 293-306.

Fowler, Roger. Linguistics and the Novel. London: Methuen and Co, 1977.

Fryer, Judith. The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1976.

Gaines, Aim J. Morey. "Of Menace and Men: The Sexual Tensions of the American Frontier Metaphor." Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 64.2 (1981):132-49.

Hall, Joan Wylie. "Treacherous Texts: The Perils of Allusions in Cather's Early Stories." Colby-Library-Quarterly 24.3 (1988): 142-50.

Humm, Maggie, ed. Feminisms: A Reader Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf,1992.

Jones, Daryl. The Dime Novel Western. Ohio: Bowling Green UP, 1978.

Jump, Harriet Devine. Diverse Voices: Essays on Twentieth Century Women Writers. New York: Harvester and Wheatsheaf, 1991.

Karolides, N. J. The Image of the Pioneer in the American Novel, 1900-1950. Diss. New York U, 1963. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1979

Kolodny, Annette. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontier 1630-1860. London: U of North Carolina P, 1984.

Leech, Geoffrey N. and Michael H. Short. Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. New York: Longman, 1991.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: Norton, 1988.

Marks, Elaine and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. The New French Feminisms: An Anthology. New York: Schocken Books, 1981.

Norwood, Vera and Janice Monk, eds. The Desert is no Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women's Writing and Art. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.

0' Brien, Sharon. "Feminist Biography as Shaped Narrative: Telling Willa Cather's Stories." Autobiography Studies 8.2 (1993): 258-70.

Pearson, Carol and Katherine Pope. The Female Hero in American and British Literature. New York: R.R. Bowker Company, 1981.

Peavy, Linda and Ursula Smith. Pioneer Women: The Lives of Women on the Frontier Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1996.

Riley, Glenda. "The Myth of Female Fear of Western Landscapes." Journal of the West 37.2 (1998): 33-41.

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London and New York: Methuen, 1983.

Rosowski, Susan, ed. Approaches to Teaching Cather's My Antonia. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1989.

---. Birthing A Nation: Gender Creativity, and the West in American Literature. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999.

Ryder, Mary Ruth. Willa Cather and Classical Myth: The Search for a New Parnassus. Queenston: Edwin Mellen P, 1990.

Sellers, Susan. Language and Sexual Difference: Feminist Writing in France. London: MacMillan, 1991.

Simpson, Paul. Language, Ideology and Point of View. London: Routledge, 1993.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. New York: Harper Perennial, 1996.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. London: Harvard UP, 1978.

Stout, Janis P. Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2000.

Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Toolan, Michael J. The Stylistics of Fiction: A Literary-linguistic Approach. London: Routledge, 1990.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Wisconsin: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin. 1984.

Verdonk, Peter. Stylistics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.

Repository Staff Only: item control page
 
 
 
 
 
 
© Copyright 2007 MyAIS Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya – All Rights Reserved. Malaysian Abstracting and Indexing System is powered by EPrints 3 which is developed by the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. More information and software credits.