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Willa CatherA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
"A Wagner Matinée" is a short story by Willa Cather, an early 20th-century American writer known primarily for her novels of life on the frontier. Although the story, originally published in 1904, was one of Cather's first pieces of prose fiction, it anticipates much of Cather's later work, and, most notably, the novel My Ántonia, which also recounts the experiences of a frontier woman through the eyes of a man. The two works are stylistically similar as well; unlike many of her contemporaries, Cather avoided then-experimental techniques like stream-of-consciousness in favor of more grounded descriptions of people and thenatural world. Perhaps relatedly, there is a strongly nostalgic tone to many of Cather's works, with characters longing to return to an earlier era.
This is certainly true of "A Wagner Matinée," but it is also one place where the story diverges from much of Cather's later writing. Although Cather (who was herself from Nebraska) was not typically sentimental about the hardships of frontier life in her work, she did often juxtapose that hardship with images of the landscape's beauty and even sublimity. In "A Wagner Matinée," however, the farm in Red River County functionsalmost entirely as a place of deprivation and death: scratching out a living there is difficult, but even more to the point, the isolation and monotony prove all but intolerable for someone with Georgiana's artistic inclinations.
By Willa Cather
A Lost Lady
A Lost Lady
Willa Cather
Coming, Aphrodite!
Coming, Aphrodite!
Willa Cather
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather
Lucy Gayheart
Lucy Gayheart
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My Antonia
My Antonia
Willa Cather
Neighbour Rosicky
Neighbour Rosicky
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One Of Ours
One Of Ours
Willa Cather
O Pioneers!
O Pioneers!
Willa Cather
Paul's Case
Paul's Case
Willa Cather
Shadows on the Rock
Shadows on the Rock
Willa Cather
The Professor's House
The Professor's House
Willa Cather
The Sculptor's Funeral
The Sculptor's Funeral
Willa Cather
The Song of the Lark
The Song of the Lark
Willa Cather