Burns is a writing specialist at Emmanuel College, and her areas of special studies include film studies and nineteenth-century British literature as well as gay and lesbian studies. In the following essay, she discusses the balances between life and death in Cather's "Neighbour Rosicky.''

With her portrayal of Anton Rosicky, a Bohemian farmer on the Nebraska prairie in the 1920s, Willa Cather returns to the settings and themes of her early fiction. Like O Pioneers! and My Antonia, "Neighbour Rosicky" explores both the literal and symbolic importance of the land to the people who settled on the plains in the first decades of the twentieth century. Cather's sympathetic interest in the struggles and triumphs of the immigrants who domesticated the great prairies of the Midwest is keenly alive in this story about one farmer's gentle cultivation of his land and his home. Though A farm...