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영어

My Antonia has been considered as a text based on cultural pluralism due to Willa Cather’s interest in new immigrants and their culture in the late 19th century and early 20th century. She has also been estimated to advocate a transfer or migration of new immigrants’ culture to America because she argued that a nation’s culture would be rich by the preservation of ethnic distinctiveness and firmly resisted America’s assimilation policy. My Antonia, however, shows racial differences with Jim, the text’s white male narrator, disclosing a racial hierarchy among European immigrants. Thus, this study begins with the premise that Cather rooted cultural distinctiveness in the racial difference which many nativists believed in and relied on the racial hierarchy which eugenicists insisted on. For discussion, examining and reflecting historical situation and social issues at that time, this study explores the distinctions among European races in My Antonia. This study partly accepts Cather’s positive stance on the new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe but considers her commitment to the cultural diversity of the frontier to be deficient because Cather places Antonia’s racial identity and her traditional motherhood within her individual society which is isolated and remote from the mainstream society.