Abstract: Willa Cather's western novels contain surprising turns in her episodic, story-filled narratives that disrupt whatever conventional expectations a reader might have about realist plots. Narratively unexplained and unmoralized catastrophe poses a problem for narrative when it disrupts plot's semantic content and context. Cather's insertion of catastrophe shapes what I would call her environmental realism and may yet prove one of the most preparative and reparative aspects of her novels when read in the time of climate catastrophe, a shift in history that upends cherished models of narrative and historiographical time.
William R. Handley (Sun,) studied this question.