Willa Cather Revisited: Aesthetic Resistance in <i>My Ántonia</i>

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.