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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.

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 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.

Goodwin Wharton is the story of a quest - the attempt of a seventeenth-century aristocrat to transmute arcane knowledge into wealth, power, and salvation. Its protagonist, Goodwin Wharton (1653-1704), attempting to recoup his losses in engineering, deep-sea diving, and alchemy, formed an allianced with Mary Tomson Boucher Lawrence Parish - spiritualist, physician, biologist, and uniquely gifted confidence woman. Together, with occasional help from three MPs, they sought for spirit-guarded treasures, entrance to the lowland kingdom of the fairies, success in alchemy, and angelic guidance for diving expeditions. Meanwhile, Mary became Goodwin's mistress, and Goodwin acquired great spiritual gifts - visions, audible revelations, ordinations, an infallible inner voice - and the love of three queens of England. -- Book Jacket.

This study imagines modernism as a series of conversations and locates Edith Wharton s voice in those debates.

Edith Wharton's "Evolutionary Conception" investigates Edith Wharton's engagement with evolutionary theory in The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence. The book also examines The Descent of Man, The Fruit of the Tree, Twilight Sleep, and The Children to show that Wharton's interest in biology and sociology was central to the thematic and formal elements of her fiction. Ohler argues that Wharton depicts the complex interrelations of New York's gentry and socioeconomic elite from a perspective informed by the main concerns of evolutionary thought. Concentrating on her use of ideas she encountered in works by Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and T.H. Huxley, his readings of Wharton's major novels demonstrate the literary configuration of scientific ideas she drew on and, in some cases, disputed. R.W.B. Lewis writes that Wharton 'was passionately addicted to scientific study': this book explores the ramifications of this fact for her fictional sociobiology. The book explores the ways in which Edith Wharton's scientific interests shaped her analysis of class, affected the formal properties of her fiction, and resulted in her negative valuation of social Darwinism.

Considered simply as a story, the narrative has intrinsic drama, with a complex protagonist, a vivid cast of historical characters, and enough conflict (including family conflicts) for several novels. The cast is headed by the redoubtable Wharton clan and by the party leaders, royal and non-royal, who dominated the period. The characters are usually vivid, often confused, sometimes psychotic, and (in the Restoration era) seldom pure. History is sometimes indistinguishable from gossip - some of it supplied by the Whartons. Political drama often becomes social drama.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

A patrician who wrote most often of the fashionable 19th-century New York society she knew so well, Edith Wharton was inspired to write the novel Ethan Frome after spending summers at her home in Lenox, Massachusetts. Born during the Civil War and dying near the start of World War II, Wharton experienced the transformation of American society from a rural republic to an industrial power. Her experiences are reflected in her writing, and Ethan Frome is widely studied at all levels. This book is a systematic introduction to her novel. The guide draws upon Wharton's autobiography and letters to trace her literary and artistic development. In addition to a detailed plot summary, the book gives special attention to the influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne and other writers on her work. It also analyzes Wharton's style and themes and overviews the critical reception of her novel.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece of unfulfilled romance set against the backdrop of old New York. THIS ENRICHED CLASSIC EDITION INCLUDES: ¥ A concise introduction that gives the reader important background information ¥ A chronology of the author's life and work ¥ A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context ¥ An outline of key themes and plot points to guide the reader's own interpretations ¥ Detailed explanatory notes ¥ Critical analysis, including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work ¥ Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction ¥ A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience