Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- 1 The American historical romance: a prospectus
- 2 The Waverley-model and the rise of historical romance
- 3 Historical romance and the stadialist model of progress
- 4 The regionalism of historical romance
- 5 Hawthorne and the ironies of New England history
- 6 Melville: the red comets return
- 7 The hero and heroine of historical romance
- 8 The historical romance of the South
- 9 Retrospect: departures and returns
- Notes
- Index
4 - The regionalism of historical romance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- 1 The American historical romance: a prospectus
- 2 The Waverley-model and the rise of historical romance
- 3 Historical romance and the stadialist model of progress
- 4 The regionalism of historical romance
- 5 Hawthorne and the ironies of New England history
- 6 Melville: the red comets return
- 7 The hero and heroine of historical romance
- 8 The historical romance of the South
- 9 Retrospect: departures and returns
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In Book III of My Ántonia Jim Burden's brilliant young classics teacher Gaston Cleric glosses the opening lines of Book III of the Georgics:
‘Primus ego in patriam mecum … deducam Musas’; ‘for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country.’ Cleric had explained to us that ‘patria’ here meant, not a nation or even a province, but the little rural neighbourhood on the Mincio where the poet was born. This was not a boast, but a hope, at once bold and devoutly humble, that he might bring the Muse (but lately come to Italy from her cloudy Grecian mountains), not to the capital, the palatia Romana, but to his own little ‘country’; to his father's fields, ‘sloping down to the river and to the old beech trees with broken tops.’
A little later Jim wonders “whether that particular rocky strip of New England coast about which he had so often told me was Cleric's patria” (p. 265), and the reader is bound to wonder whether Willa Cather herself had in mind her friend Sara Orne Jewett and The Country of the Pointed Firs – Maine Theocritus to Cather's Nebraskan Virgil.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The American Historical Romance , pp. 99 - 128Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987