This analysis explores how catastrophe reshapes narratives in Cather’s novels, suggesting new ways to understand environmental realism.
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.
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William R. Handley (2026) studied this question.
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