Platted Mythologies: Theoretical Transformations of Space Through Myth-Making

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Rush, Christian D.

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2024-12

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In April 1883, the Cather family stepped off a Burlington coach and met the spring fields of the Great Plains. Nestled between the Republican River and the Little Blue, the Cathers found themselves in “the Divide,” a region of Webster County, Nebraska, only twelve miles northwest of Red Cloud; an undefined place on any map but well known to the locals that lived there. Like so many before them, the Cathers sought to secure a plot of land given to them by the federal government. While the Cathers ultimately gave up their homestead, moving to Red Cloud after almost two years in the unmapped Divide, the frontier’s fields left a lasting mark on the then-young Willa Cather. Cather pioneered a literary space often left unrepresented in turn-of-the-century literature, with contemporaries like Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald who wrote about cosmopolitan life. While Cather ultimately did not stay in Red Cloud—moving to Lincoln, Nebraska, to attend the University in 1890 before journeying east to Pittsburgh to write for the women’s magazine Home Monthly—her first four novels were directly linked to her upbringing in the Great Plains.

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Creighton University School of Law

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