Off-campus UNL users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your NU ID and password. When you are done browsing please remember to return to this page and log out.
Non-UNL users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
Cultural artifact/cultural aesthetic: Music in literature of the Great Plains
Abstract
Drawing chiefly upon the theories of music as communication posited by critic Steven Feld, this dissertation explores the various ways several Great Plains authors use music as "speech" to provide structure, preserve culture, critique historical assumptions, or complement the literary aesthetic in many genres. A cross-border as well as interdisciplinary study, I not only pursue changing perceptions of the American West and culture through American novelists such as Willa Cather, O. E. Rolvaag, and Wallace Stegner, but trace similar East-West issues along with border concerns in the works of several Canadian authors: Gwen Pharis Ringwood (dramatist), Michael Ondaatje (postcolonial poet and novelist), Hugh Hood (novelist), and Sinclair Ross (novelist). Thus, opera and German lieder, along with early writings on music that have their foundation in America's Wagner cult inform our understanding of Cather's creative development from The Song of the Lark to Lucy Gayheart. Hymns and folk tunes serve as cultural imprints throughout Rolvaag's immigrant trilogy, while Ross foregrounds classical music--notably the works of Debussy and Chopin--and turn-of-the-century painters in an effort to intensify the desolation of the Depression-era Saskatchewan prairie and tension among characters within As For Me and My House. Jazz functions as a key structural and thematic device, and as a relevant historical event, in Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter and Hood's Be Sure to Close Your Eyes, and cowboy songs and folk songs become vehicles through which Stegner and Ringwood simultaneously glorify and critique the mythic West in The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Stampede, respectively.
Subject Area
American literature|Canadian literature|Music
Recommended Citation
Coleman-Hull, Philip Ross, "Cultural artifact/cultural aesthetic: Music in literature of the Great Plains" (1996). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9637064.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9637064