SOURCE: Stouck, David. Willa Cather's Imagination, pp. 35–46, 73–82, 171–81. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975.

In the following excerpt, Stouck discusses Cather's major narrative techniques as well as her portrayal of the artistic temperament in her short fiction.

The Pastoral Imagination

In pastoral the imagination counters the failures of the present by moving back into the past. In recovering lost time the artist may seek to recapture a world of childhood innocence, or he may attempt to resolve the conflicts in his past experiences which have prevented him from living meaningfully in the present. In either case the term pastoral here signifies not just a rural subject, but a mode of art based on memory. Pastoral, in keeping with its classical etymology, has been a term in literary criticism applied to works of art with a bucolic setting. William Empson, however, in Some Versions of Pastoral expanded the term to indicate...