A Study Of The Subjects In Willa Cather’s Short Stories

Willa Cather (1873—1947) is one of the most famous women writers in the firsthalf of the twentieth century in the American literary history. Examined both from theperspective of literature and aesthetics, as well as their influence on people’s spiritualworld, Cather’s words are worth exploring. Altogether Willa Cather wrote16novelsand55short novels in her life time. She is good at describing women and the earlypioneering life of American immigrants. She is recognized as one of the most importantlocal color writers in America.Cather started her creative career with short stories and ended it with them aswell. She only published three collections of short stories in her lifetime: The TrollGarden, Youth and the Bright Medusa and Obscure Destinies, the fourth one namedThe Old Beauty and Others was published after she died. The representative of theshort stories are: The Garden Lodge，The Bohemian Girl，Neighbor Rosicky,TheSculptor’s Funeral and so on. These works also reveal the major themes that she hadbeen writing about throughout her life. Her early short stories were insightful andmeaningful, which implied an effort of her exploration during her growth. It could befound that the themes implied in her short stories reappear in her novels. Therefore theshort stories and novels are closely related to each other in this aspect. The thesis aimsto analyze the representative stories of Cather’s according to the focus of subjects.Based on close reading, combined with the research of her life experience, the historicalbackground and her ideas of literary creation, the thesis tries to summarize the reasonsfor Cather’s writing about these subjects.There are altogether six parts in this thesis, namely an introduction, four chaptersand a conclusion. The introduction includes the literature review and a briefintroduction to Willa Cather and her works. The first chapter is an assorted discussionon the works taking the western frontier pioneers as a subject; so does this apply to thesecond chapter on the subject of artists; the third chapter is on the subject of women;the fourth chapter draws out the root cause for Willa Cather’s working on these subjects,as though the study of her life experience, the historical background and the ideasguiding her literary creation.