Willa Cather Revisited: Aesthetic Resistance in My Ántonia

Abstract The literary classification of Willa Cather has long been contested in academia. While her contemporaries directly engaged modernity’s crises, her works are often oversimplified as nostalgic retreats. Yet a close reading of My Ántonia reveals her pastoral nostalgia as a deliberate aesthetic strategy. Through the cultural resilience of Ántonia, a Bohemian immigrant, Cather critiques Enlightenment modernity beneath a pastoral surface, transforming immigrant experience into an alternative modernist practice. Her work moves beyond mere nostalgia, using regional storytelling and non-confrontational critique as a subtle yet avant-garde response to modernity’s crises. This approach, rooted in yet transcending local experience, solidifies Cather’s place as a modernist writer and expands the scope of American modernist literature.