Imagined Communities: Sara Orne Jewett and Willa Cather

Willa Cather didn’t just see 19^th-century writer Sarah Orne Jewett as a mentor. She also considered Jewett’s “The Country of the Pointed Firs” (1896) – along with Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” and Twain’s “Huck Finn” – to be one of three greatest works of American literature. This six-week class will explore Jewett’s masterpiece as well as Cather’s own “My Antonia” (1918), focusing on the communities each novel imagines into being, the role of women within those communities, the gestures of inclusion and exclusion practiced within each community (Jewett’s Maine; Cather’s Nebraska), and what these communities can tell us about the way American imagined itself as it assumed an increasingly prominent role on the world’s stage.