what is my antoina about it is a book by the way.?

Question

need a/s/a/p

Answer 1

Yes it's a book.... here are some helpful, bare minimum "about the book" facts:

PROTAGONIST

Jim Burden, a boy who comes from Virginia to live with his grandparents on their farm in Nebraska.

ANTAGONIST

The antagonist of the novel is Antonia, especially as she comes to represent all the beauties and contradictions of the Midwest as it was settled in the late nineteenth century.

CLIMAX

Antonia becomes infatuated with the dances in town and is given the ultimatum of not going to the dances or being fired. She quits her job with the Harlings and is, thereafter, ostracized from middle-class Black Hawk life. Jim sides with her at first, going to dances with the hired women.

Answer 2

The synopses already provided are pretty accurate, except I'd like to take issue with the idea that Antonia is an "antagonist." The novel is typically classified as a work of regionalism- which is a subgenre of naturalism. In naturalism, the "antagonist" is usually nature or man's nature, not a particular person per se. In My Antonia, there isn't really a tangible, physical antagonist. On one hand, the harsh prairie is the "baddy"- but then again, the landscape is also romanticized as beautiul in its natural, wild primitiveness. Antonia comes to represent the prairie itself- a nostalgic memory of Jim Burden's childhood that is otherwise lost forever. In a world threatened by development, she is Jim's last link to his childhood among nature.

Answer 3

It's a great book written by Willa Cather. Synopsis (from Amazon):

It seems almost sacrilege to infringe upon a book as soulful and rich as Willa Cather's My Ántonia by offering comment. First published in 1918, and set in Nebraska in the late 19th century, this tale of the spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family planning to farm on the untamed land ("not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made") comes to us through the romantic eyes of Jim Burden. He is, at the time of their meeting, newly orphaned and arriving at his grandparents' neighboring farm on the same night her family strikes out to make good in their new country. Jim chooses the opening words of his recollections deliberately: "I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to be an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America," and it seems almost certain that readers of Cather's masterpiece will just as easily pinpoint the first time they heard of Ántonia and her world. It seems equally certain that they, too, will remember that moment as one of great light in an otherwise unremarkable trip through the world.
Ántonia, who, even as a grown woman somewhat downtrodden by circumstance and hard work, "had not lost the fire of life," lies at the center of almost every human condition that Cather's novel effortlessly untangles. She represents immigrant struggles with a foreign land and tongue, the restraints on women of the time (with which Cather was very much concerned), the more general desires for love, family, and companionship, and the great capacity for forbearance that marked the earliest settlers on the frontier.

As if all this humanity weren't enough, Cather paints her descriptions of the vastness of nature--the high, red grass, the road that "ran about like a wild thing," the endless wind on the plains--with strokes so vivid as to make us feel in our bones that we've just come in from a walk on that very terrain ourselves. As the story progresses, Jim goes off to the University in Lincoln to study Latin (later moving on to Harvard and eventually staying put on the East Coast in another neat encompassing of a stage in America's development) and learns Virgil's phrase "Optima dies ... prima fugit" that Cather uses as the novel's epigraph. "The best days are the first to flee"--this could be said equally of childhood and the earliest hours of this country in which the open land, much like My Ántonia, was nothing short of a rhapsody in prairie sky blue. --