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Writing Isolation and the Resistance to Assimilation as "Imaginative Art": Willa Cather's Anti-Narrative in Shadows on the Rock

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From: Journal of Narrative Theory : JNT
Date: 20071001
Author:Driedger, Derek

If the novel is a form of imaginative art, it cannot be at the same time a vivid and brilliant form of journalism. Out of the teeming, gleaming stream of the present it must select the eternal material of art. There are hopeful signs that some of the younger writers are trying to break away from mere verisimilitude, and, following the development of modern painting, to interpret imaginatively the material and social investiture of their characters; to present their scene by suggestion rather than by enumeration.

-Willa Cather, "The Novel Démeublé"

An orderly little French household that ...

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