2019 Fiscal Year Annual Research Report
Rural Texts, Global Contexts: Willa Cather's Cosmopolitan Imagination
| Project/Area Number |
16K02501
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| Research Institution | Hiroshima City University |
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Principal Investigator |
ゴーマン マイケル 広島市立大学, 国際学部, 教授 (20625892)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2016-04-01 – 2020-03-31
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| Keywords | Willa Cather / Internationalism / Modernism / Rurality / World War I / Slow Violence / Boxer Rebellion / Cosmopolitanism |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
In the 2019-20 academic year, I was able to publish an article based on research conducted in 2018; I presented a conference paper at the 2019 Western Literature Association conference in Colorado, and I deepened my understanding of Willa Cather by visiting locations relevant to her life and writing.
In Colorado and New Mexico, I visited Mesa Verde, the Cathedral of St. Francis, the Los Alamos History Museum, and the Albuquerque Museum, and the Gallup Cultural Center--places highlighting the history of Indigenous people in the Southwest. I also visited sites relating to Cather’s writing about Plains Indians including the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma; the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave outside of Denver, Colorado; and the Dignity statue in Chamberlain, South Dakota.
Research in the Midwest included stops at the National World War I Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Iowa State University Farm House Museum in Ames, which were helpful to understand the Post-frontier experiences depicted in A Lost Lady (1923) and One of Ours (1922). I also researched sustainability and the climate crisis to consider how these 21st century issues influence how contemporary readers interpret Cather's 20th century texts. “Brutal Nostalgia, Slow Violence, and My Antonia: Making America Great Again, Volume 1,” the paper that I delivered at the 2019 WLA conference in Estes Park, was based on this research.
My article, “Where Pagodas Rise on Every Hill: Romance as Resistance in “A Son of the Celestial,’” will be published in the upcoming volume of Cather Studies 13.
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Research Products
(2 results)
