Edith Whartons Brave New Politics

Most critics claim that Edith Wharton's creative achievement peaked with her novels The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, dismissing her later fiction as reactionary, sensationalistic and aesthetically inferior. In Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics, Dale M. Bauer overturns these traditional conclusions. She shows that Wharton's post-World War I writings are acutely engaged with the cultural debates of her day - from reproductive control, to authoritarian politics, to mass culture and its ramifications.

Kassanoff shows how Wharton participated in debates on race, class and democratic pluralism at the turn of the twentieth century.

"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 Ferd 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

"The study emphasizes the crucial role that Wharton's contact with Europe had on her writing, and the significance intellectually and politically of her relationship with Morton Fullerton and her reading of his books on politics. It locates Wharton in her period, surrounded as she was by discourses which called for political and social change, change which an outlook that Peel calls "American Toryism" made her reluctant to embrace. Her love of motorcars and her excitement about other technological developments such as aeroplanes was inspired by a feeling of exclusivity and not the democratization of culture, which she feared and condemned. France, England, Italy, and America formed the quartet of countries that contained the best and worst of culture, and Peel emphasizes how ironical it was that a writer whose ideological beliefs endorsed the importance of home, roots, and tradition should have spent so much of her life as a restless, apparently rootless traveler."--BOOK JACKET.

"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

This set treats the whole of American literature, from the European discovery of America to the present, with entries in alphabetical order. Each of the 350 substantive essays is a major interpretive contribution. Well-known critics and scholars provide clear and vividly written essays thatreflect the latest scholarship on a given topic, as well as original thinking on the part of the critic. The Encyclopedia is available in print and as an e-reference text from Oxford's Digital Reference Shelf.At the core of the encyclopedia lie 250 essays on poets, playwrights, essayists, and novelists. The most prominent figures (such as Whitman, Melville, Faulkner, Frost, Morrison, and so forth) are treated at considerable length (10,000 words) by top-flight critics. Less well known figures arediscussed in essays ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words. Each essay examines the life of the author in the context of his or her times, looking in detail at key works and describing the arc of the writer's career. These essays include an assessment of the writer's current reputation with abibliography of major works by the writer as well as a list of major critical and biographical works about the writer under discussion.A second key element of the project is the critical assessments of major American masterworks, such as Moby-Dick, Song of Myself, Walden, The Great Gatsby, The Waste Land, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Death of a Salesmanr, or Beloved. Each of these essays offers a close reading of the given work,placing that work in its historical context and offering a range of possibilities with regard to critical approach. These fifty essays (ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words) are simply and clearly enough written that an intelligent high school student should easily understand them, but sophisticatedenough that a college student or general reader in a public library will find the essays both informative and stimulating.The final major element of this encyclopedia consists of fifty-odd essays on literary movements, periods, or themes, pulling together a broad range of information and making interesting connections. These essays treat many of the same authors already discussed, but in a different context; they alsogather into the fold authors who do not have an entire essay on their work (so that Zane Grey, for example, is discussed in an essay on Western literature but does not have an essay to himself). In this way, the project is truly "encyclopedic," in the conventional sense. These essays aim forcomprehensiveness without losing anything of the narrative force that makes them good reading in their own right.In a very real fashion, the literature of the American people reflects their deepest desires, aspirations, fears, and fantasies. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature gathers a wide range of information that illumines the field itself and clarifies many of its particulars.

Bringing together leading voices from across the globe, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton represents state-of-the-art scholarship on the American writer Edith Wharton, once primarily known as a New York novelist. Focusing on Wharton's extensive body of work and renaissance across 21st-century popular culture, chapters consider: - Wharton in the context of queer studies, race studies, whiteness studies, age studies, disability studies, anthropological studies, and economics; - Wharton's achievements in genres for which she deserves to be better known: poetry, drama, the short story, and non-fiction prose; - Comparative studies with Christina Rossetti, Henry James, and Willa Cather; -The places and cultures Wharton documented in her writing, including France, Greece, Italy, and Morocco; - Wharton's work as a reader and writer and her intersections with film and the digital humanities. Book-ended by Dale Bauer and Elaine Showalter, and with a foreword by the Director and senior staff at The Mount, Wharton's historic Massachusetts home, the Handbook underscores Wharton's lasting impact for our new Gilded Age. It is an indispensable resource for readers interested in Wharton and 19th- and 20th-century literature and culture.

Edith Wharton, arguably the most important American female novelist, stands at a particular historical crossroads between sentimental lady writer and modern professional author. Her ability to cope with this collision of Victorian and modern sensibilities makes her work especially interesting. Wharton also writes of American subjects at a time of great social and economic change-Darwinism, urbanization, capitalism, feminism, world war, and eugenics. She not only chronicles these changes in memorable detail, she sets them in perspective through her prodigious knowledge of history, philosophy, and religion. A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton provides scholarly and general readers with historical contexts that illuminate Wharton's life and writing in new, exciting ways. Essays in the volume expand our sense of Wharton as a novelist of manners and demonstrate her engagement with issues of her day.

Edith Wharton's wide reading in the nascent disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and evolutionary theory of her day plays a role in her social fictions. She understands her world in binary terms of belonging and exile, of spatial boundaries and exclusions, and tribal behaviour. She applied that intellectual framework to the struggle to preserve the Old World from the territorial and cultural threat of the Great War. In linked thematic sections, Claire Preston considers ideas of tribal inclusion and banishment, buccaneer figures whose money-energy overcomes tribal demarcations, and expatriatism, the self-imposed mode of exile which fed Wharton's apparently chilly empiricism and was the origin of some of her most important work. She suggests that, against the claims of realism, Wharton should in fact be included in the early Modernist canon.