Writings of Edith WhartonGuests examined the history of the Gilded Age through the writings of Edith Wharton, author of The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country and Ethan Frome. Wharton wrote The Age of Innocence in 1920, with the story taking place in the late 1800s in “Old New York.” Among the topics addressed were the U.S. during the turn of the century, life among “elite” society, how “old money families” of New York dealt with the “newly rich,” and America’s growing role internationally.
The Age of Innocence by Edith WartonNewland Archer could not dream of anyone better suited to be his fiancée than his beloved, May Welland. She's innocent and beautiful and comes from a well-regarded aristocratic family. So why can't Newland stop thinking about May's cousin, the scandalous Countess Ellen Olenska? Not only does the Countess wear revealing clothing and express unconventional (and unpopular) views, she's also rumored to have done the unacceptable: divorce her husband, the Polish Count. Yet despite it all, Newland cannot help but feel that May is a bland debutante compared to her cousin. As their wedding approaches, Archer must decide if the rules of society are more important than his personal happiness. First published in 1920, this is an unabridged version of Edith Warton's Pulitzer Prize-winning American novel.
Edith Wharton by Louis AuchinclossEdith Wharton - American Writers 12 was first published in 1961. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Edith Wharton by Harold Bloom-- Brings together the best criticism on the most widely read poets, novelists, and playwrights-- Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world -- from the English medievalists to contemporary writers
Edith Wharton: Art and Allusion by Helen KilloranThis book uses traditional methods to show that Edith Wharton's learning in literature and the fine arts was unusually masterful, that she applied her knowledge to create new models of literary allusion, and that in her work she planted clues to personal secrets. The effects of this study is to require reassessment not only of the critical possibilities of Edith Wharton's work and the private life about which she was so reticent but also of her position in American literature. The book concludes with the assertion that, as a bridge between the Victorian and modern periods, Edith Wharton should stand independently as an American writer of the first rank.
Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism by Meredith L. Goldsmith"These energizing, excellent essays address the international scope of Wharton's writing and contribute to the growing fields of transatlantic, hemispheric, and global studies."--Carol J. Singley, author of A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton "Readers will emerge with a new respect for Wharton's engagement with the world around her and for her ability to convey her particular vision in her literary works."--Julie Olin-Ammentorp, author of Edith Wharton's Writings from the Great War Hailed for her remarkable social and psychological insights into the Gilded Age lives of privileged Americans, Edith Wharton, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, was a transnational author who attempted to understand and appreciate the culture, history, and artifacts of the regions she encountered in her extensive travels abroad. Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism explores the international scope of Wharton's life and writing, focusing on how her work connects with the idea of cosmopolitanism. This volume illustrates the many ways Wharton engaged with global issues of her time. Contributors examine both her canonical and lesser-known works, including her art historical discoveries, political work, travel writing, World War I texts, and first novel. They consider themes of anarchism, race, imperialism, regionalism, and orientalism; Wharton's treatment of contemporary marriage debates; her indebtedness to her literary predecessors; and her genre experimentation. Together, they demonstrate how Wharton's struggle to balance her powerful local and national identifications with cosmopolitan values, resulted in a diverse, complex, and sometimes problematic relationship to a cosmopolitan vision. Contributors: Ferdâ Asya | William Blazek | Rita Bode | Donna Campbell | Mary Carney | Clare Virginia Eby | June Howard | Meredith L. Goldsmith | Sharon Kim | D. Medina Lasansky | Maureen Montgomery | Emily J. Orlando | Margaret A. Toth | Gary Totten
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780813055923
Publication Date: 2016-09-16
Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race by Jennie A. KassanoffEdith Wharton feared that the 'ill-bred', foreign and poor would overwhelm a native American elite. Drawing on a range of turn-of-the-century social documents, unpublished archival material and all of Wharton's novels, Jennie A. Kassanoff argues that a more accurate picture of her appreciation of American culture and democracy develops through less engagement with these controversial views. She pursues her theme by documenting Wharton's spirited participation in turn-of-the-century discourses ranging from euthanasia and tourism to pragmatism and Native Americans.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780521830898
Publication Date: 2004-09-16
Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts by Emily J. OrlandoAn insightful look at representations of women's bodies and female authority. This work explores Edith Wharton's career-long concern with a 19th-century visual culture that limited female artistic agency and expression. Wharton repeatedly invoked the visual arts--especially paintingmdash;as a medium for revealing the ways that women's bodies have been represented (as passive, sexualized, infantalized, sickly, dead). Well-versed in the Italian masters, Wharton made special use of the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly its penchant for producing not portraits of individual women but instead icons onto whose bodies male desire is superimposed. Emily Orlando contends that while Wharton's early work presents women enshrined by men through art, the middle and later fiction shifts the seat of power to women. From Lily Bart in The House of Mirth to Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country and Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence, women evolve from victims to vital agents, securing for themselves a more empowering and satisfying relationship to art and to their own identities. Orlando also studies the lesser-known short stories and novels, revealing Wharton's re-workings of texts by Browning, Poe, Balzac, George Eliot, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and, most significantly, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts is the first extended study to examine the presence in Wharton's fiction of the Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting of Rossetti and his muses, notably Elizabeth Siddall and Jane Morris. Wharton emerges as one of American literature's most gifted inter-textual realists, providing a vivid lens through which to view issues of power, resistance, and social change as they surface in American literature and culture.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780817382162
Publication Date: 2007
Edith Wharton in Context by Laura Rattray (Editor)Edith Wharton was one of America's most popular and prolific writers, becoming the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921. In a publishing career spanning seven decades, Wharton lived and wrote through a period of tremendous social, cultural, and historical change. Bringing together a team of international scholars, this volume provides the first substantial text dedicated to the various contexts that frame Wharton's remarkable career. Each essay offers a clearly argued and lucid assessment of Wharton's work as it relates to seven key areas: life and works, critical receptions, book and publishing history, arts and aesthetics, social designs, time and place, and literary milieux. These sections provide a broad and accessible resource for students coming to Wharton for the first time while offering scholars new critical insights. Of interest to English and American studies departments, the volume will also appeal to researchers in gender studies, film studies, book history, art history, and transatlantic studies.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9781107010192
Publication Date: 2012-10-08
Edith Wharton in Context: Essays on Intertextuality by Adeline R. TintnerTintner provides a detailed analysis of the complex interplay between Wharton and James--how they influenced each other and how some of their writings operate as homages or personal jokes. So deeply was James in Wharton's confidence, Tintner argues, that he provided her with source models for a number of her characters. In addition, Wharton found in his fiction structures for her own, especially for The Age of Innocence. Tintner also brings her considerable knowledge of art history to bear in her study of art allusions in Wharton's work. Wharton's response both to the Italian painters active before Raphael and to the English Pre-Raphaelites of a generation before her own is analyzed here in three essays. These pieces demonstrate Wharton's sensibility to changes in art tastes and collecting, the inheritance of Rossetti's revolutionary paintings in the unfinished novel, The Buccaneers, and the importance of home in The Glimpses of the Moon, as demonstrated by Wharton's use of Tiepolo's fresco in the church of Scalzi. Tintner concludes by considering Wharton's literary legacy and who Wharton has figured in the imaginations of recent writers, including Richard Howard, Louis Auchincloss, and Cathleen Schine. Tintner finds some part of Wharton's personality or work evoked in a number of contemporary works and argues that this presence signals the beginning of an increasing influence.
Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton by Dianne L. ChambersThis close and innovative study of Edith Wharton's major novels reveals the use of increasingly complex narrative techniques to counter the multiple forces working against women writers at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780230617650
Publication Date: 2009-12-18
Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton by Kathy A. FedorkoAn investigation into Wharton's extensive use and adaptation of the Gothic in her fiction Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton is an innovative study that provides fresh insights into Wharton's male characters while at the same time showing how Wharton's imagining of a fe/male self evolves throughout her career. Using feminist archetypal theory and theory of the female Gothic, Kathy A. Fedorko shows how Wharton, in sixteen short stories and six major novels written during four distinct periods of her life, adopts and adapts Gothic elements to explore the nature of feminine and masculine ways of knowing and being and to dramatize the tension between them. Edith Wharton's contradictory views of women and men--her attitudes toward the feminine and the masculine--reflect a complicated interweaving of family and social environment, historical time, and individual psychology. Studies of Wharton have exhibited this same kind of contradiction, with some seeing her as disparaging men and the masculine and others depicting her as disparaging women and the feminine. The use of Gothic elements in her fiction provided Wharton, who was often considered the consummate realist, with a way to dramatize the conflict between feminine and masculine selves as she experienced them and to evolve an alternative to the dualism. Fedorko's work is unique in its careful consideration of Wharton's sixteen Gothic works, which are seldom discussed. Further, the revelation of how these Gothic stories are reflected in her major realistic novels. In the novels with Gothic texts, Wharton draws multiple parallels between male and female protagonists, indicating the commonalities between women and men and the potential for a female self. Eventually, in her last completed novel and her last short story, Wharton imagines human beings who are comfortable with both gender selves.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780817359133
Publication Date: 2017
Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture by Gary Totten (Editor)In Edith Wharton's works, references to architecture, interior decoration, painting, sculpture, and fashion abound. As these essays demonstrate, art and objects are for Wharton evidence of cultural belief and reflect the values, assumptions, and customs of the burgeoning consumer culture in which she lived and about which she wrote. Furthermore, her meditations about issues of architecture, design, and decoration serve as important commentaries on her vision of the literary arts. In The Decoration of Houses she notes that furniture and bric-à-brac are often crowded into a room in order to compensate for a "lack of architectural composition in the treatment of the walls," and that unless an ornamental object "adequately expresses an artistic conception" it is better removed from the room. These aesthetic standards apply equally to her construction of narratives and are evidence of a sensibility that counters typical understandings of Wharton as a novelist of manners and place her instead as an important figure in the development of American literary modernism. Essays in this collection address issues such as parallels between her characters and the houses they occupy; dress as a metaphor for the flux of critical fashion; the marketing of Wharton's work to a growing female readership ; her relationship to mass culture industries such as advertising, theater, and cinema; the tableaux vivant both as set piece and as fictional strategy; the representation of female bodies as objets d'art; and her characters' attempts at self-definition through the acquisition and consumption of material goods. All of Wharton's major novels--The House of Mirth, The Fruit of the Tree, Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, Summer, The Age of Innocence, and Twilight Sleep--as well as her short stories, criticism, and essays are explored.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780817388829
Publication Date: 2014-11-01
The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton by Gloria C. ErlichLove and desire were essential ingredients in Edith Wharton's writing, as they were in her complex and passionate life. In this life history, the author shows how Wharton's sexual education evolved from her early and affectionate attachment to her nursemaid, a women she preferred over her aloof socialite mother. Growing up in a family and social system that denied both her sexual impulses and her creative urges, Wharton responded by displacing her sexuality onto words and books. Viewing her father as the source of her literary gifts, she found in his library a secret garden where sexual impulses and creative urges could flow together.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780585264011
Publication Date: 1992-01-01
Verging on the Abyss: The Social Fiction of Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton by Mary E. PapkeWhile neither Kate Chopin nor Edith Wharton can be called feminist writers, each did produce female moral art, writings that focus relentlessly on the dialectics of social relations and the position of women therein. Mary Papke analyzes their disintegrative visions through detailed readings of virtually all of their novels and several of their shorter works. Unlike comparable writers of their time, theirs was a nonpolemical but nonetheless political art in which disruption of the rules of masculine/feminine discourse and the hegemonic world view are deeply but obviously embedded within character, plot, and theme. Papke begins with a brief examination of the ideology of true womanhood, which, she argues, permeates Chopin's and Wharton's fiction and world views. The remainder of her work offers an ideological reading of their social fiction in which their characters search for states of liminality, where they might achieve, however momentarily, autonomy. Repeatedly, Papke argues, these states of liminality are literally encoded into images of characters positioned on the edge of an abyss that then becomes a repository of multiple meanings. The author presents Chopin's and Wharton's female discourse as radical art because it dares to defy that which is both alienating and destructive. Papke's provocative analysis will be of interest not only to Wharton and Chopin scholars, but also to those working in the fields of feminist and women's studies. It will also interest scholars and students of American studies, particularly those working on late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature.