Karen Simons, "Re-making the Georgic Connection: Virgil and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia," IJCT 7 (2000-2001), pp. 523-540.

Willa Cather’s famous Virgilian epigraph to My Ántonia alerts the reader to the novel’s deep engagement with the Georgics. This paper advocates a positive interpretation of the relationship between the two by exploring the role of the poem in the life and “memoirs” of Jim Burden, the novel’s narrator. In contrast to currently received notions about the poem’s “pastoralizing” influence, it argues that the Georgics illumines the Nebraska prairie and the farmers who toiled there, enabling Jim to perceive and articulate their vitality and worth. Through Jim’s story of remembrance and return, Cather ultimately presents the literary tradition, and the Georgics in particular, as a beneficent force capable of creating connections among human beings, the natural world, the past and present.