Alternating Sounds in The Song of the Lark : Willa Cather’s Acoustic Archive

This essay argues that Willa’s Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915) approaches the novel as an acoustic archive, a textual space for sound preservation.While the novel proves the author’s early and sustained interest in recording the American West’s diverse cultures and socially marginalized groups, it Goalie - Pads - Junior also proclaims the value of high art and live performance.By exploring the contradictory feelings and desires that music evokes in different listeners and then narrating the difficulty of capturing them in a fixed narrative, The Song of the Lark reveals the cultural and temporal instability of Lanyards Western identity and regional writing in the modernist period.