Historical and Archetypal Intimations of the Grail Myth in Cather's One of Ours and The Professor's House

2003 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Peter Stich
Keyword(s):  
Professor's House ◽  
One Of Ours

Sex and Evolution in Willa Cather'sO Pioneers!andThe Song of the Lark

Prospects ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 565-591
Author(s):  
Bert Bender
Keyword(s):  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Willa Cather ◽  
Thorstein Veblen ◽  
Professor's House ◽  
Song Of The Lark

Studies of Willa Cather refer to Charles Darwin so rarely that one might conclude she hardly knew of him. But at least one recent interpreter has begun to discuss the Darwinian shadow in her work, describing the “Darwinist cartography” in her novelThe Professor's House(1925) and noting the “striking parallels between Cather's mapping of America and that undertaken by her near contemporary, Thorstein Veblen.”

From Mesa Verde to "The Professor's House."

1993 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 801
Author(s):  
Alice Bell ◽  
David Harrell
Keyword(s):  
Mesa Verde ◽  
Professor's House

The Prosthetic Fantasies and Fallacies of Claude Wheeler

2020 ◽  
pp. 176-205
Author(s):  
Aaron Shaheen
Keyword(s):  
Western World ◽  
Spiritual Renewal ◽  
Italian Futurism ◽  
Prosthetic Limbs ◽  
The Us ◽  
Spiritual Wholeness ◽  
One Of Ours

The chapter frames Willa Cather’s 1922 novel One of Ours within the context of the US government’s concern about wartime production’s depletion of American forests. Government rehabilitationists and foresters alike sought to place disabled soldiers in forestry-related vocations, which would provide employment and spiritual renewal in nature. These concerns mirror those of Cather’s protagonist Claude Wheeler, who suffers a spiritual amputation at age five when his father cuts down a tree with which Claude had developed an Emersonian kinship. In war he finds spiritual wholeness by offering himself as the prosthetic limbs for those intellectually and artistically superior individuals whom the war has physically and spiritually amputated. Claude’s wholeness comes, ironically, in seeing himself as the trees being cut down for the matériel needed to win the war and civilization to the western world. This self-conceptualization puts him in close company with Italian Futurism, which praises both human mechanization and violence.

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