The eNotated My Antonia

The eNotated My Antonia

The eNotated My Antonia

The eNotated My Antonia

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Overview

Though most eBooks are simple conversions of paper books, "The eNotated My Antonia" is a completely new approach that takes advantage of the potential eBook technology offers to extend and enrich Cather's writing in a way that's convenient to use while still unobtrusive to the reader.

Based on the 1918 edition of "My Antonia" and including eight original illustrations and twelve additional images, this eNotated edition extends Cather's writing by providing a new layer of information behind the text the reader can access before, during, and after each chapter.

For instance, in Chapter 15, when Cather uses the term "goods-box," Bedell's eNotation tells us Cather means "A box of wood used for shipping food, clothing, equipment, and the like, common before the advent of pasteboard cartons."

Additional material includes a Cather timeline, an events timeline, a Nebraska pioneer history, and essays on three themes expressed in the novel: TIME - The Incommunicable Past; NARRATOR - The Road to the Past; and ELEGIAC - The Wind's Bitter Song.

"My Antonia," one of the great novels of America pioneer life, reveals, according to Bedell, "the constant worry about basic survival; the circumstances of desolation and isolation, particularly for the foreign-born; the relentless heat of summer and the bitter cold of winter; and the plight of rural and small-town women." Cather gave witness to "this particular time and place in such a way that she, too, became a pioneer--this time with her realistic, honest, and forthright portrayal of a period of the American experience that elevated her to a prominent place in our literary tradition."

If you are going to read Cather for the first time - or reread her after some years - you will best enjoy and most throughly understand her with this unique eNotated edition.

Product Details

BN ID: 2940013802216
Publisher: eNotated Classics
Publication date: 12/08/2011
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Sales rank: 249,273
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

About The Author
Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate English major at the University of Iowa, I took a survey course in American Literature; one of the assigned texts was Willa Cather's My Antonia. I liked the novel on this initial reading, but the book soon found its way to one of the bottom shelves of my library where it languished for lack of interest. It was only when I agreed to do an eNotated version of Cather's novel for eNotated Classics that I became acquainted with the book once more, and to my surprise, I fell in love with this deeply moving story of settlers in 1880s Nebraska. Because I lived for over thirty years on the Nebraska border, I could easily imagine the power of the land and the realities of frontier existence these early pioneers endured: the constant worry about basic survival; the circumstances of desolation and isolation, particularly for the foreign-born; the relentless heat of summer and the bitter cold of winter; and the plight of rural and small-town women. Cather gave witness to this particular time and place in such a way that she, too, became a pioneer--this time with her realistic, honest, and forthright portrayal of a period of the American experience that elevated her to a prominent place in our literary tradition.

I know of no other novel, except F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, that better conveys a sense of loss of what America once was. In Fitzgerald's masterpiece, the narrator Nick Carraway comes to learn that Jay Gatsby's dream--the American dream--is already behind him. "And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night." Similarly, the feelings that Cather's narrator Jim Burden expresses in regard to Antonia as they part for the last time carry the weight of a time forever gone: the innocence of childhood lost, the landscape forever altered and changed, the promise and hope of America now diminished by the past.

Date of Birth:

December 7, 1873

Date of Death:

April 27, 1947

Place of Birth:

Winchester, Virginia

Place of Death:

New York, New York

Education:

B.A., University of Nebraska, 1895
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