Singing an American song: Tocquevillian reflections on Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark

• Main Author: HENDERSON, Christine Rodman
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2002
• Subjects: American Studies; English Language and Literature
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3396
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Observing nineteenth-century America in his Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked, "The Americans have not yet, properly speaking, got any literature." This assertation was precisely meant: Tocqueville believed that existing American literature was derivative of European - and particularly British - literature. American authors had yet to discover a distinctive national "voice"; thus no works of literature which were particularly American in form and/or in character had emerged fromthe pens of those writing in the United States at the time Tocqueville wrote the Democracy. Since then, however, our country's literature has come into its own, and authors such as Twain, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald come to mind as creators of a distintive American voice and literary form. Willa Cather, too deserves inclusion in any listing of American writers who emerged after Tocqueville's observation and whose works reflect what might be called an American voice.