Blake Nevius’s close analysis and appraisal of Edith Wharton’s novels and stories reveals the modernity of her fiction and shows why she should have a permanent claim on our attention. Wharton is the only American novelist who has dealt successfully and at length with the remains of traditional New York society, which barely survived the beginning of the twentieth century. She illuminated, as no other novelist of her generation was able to do, a major aspect of U.S. social history through the dramatic conflict between the ideals of the old mercantile and the new industrial societies. Nevius also argues that Wharton, next to Henry James, is our most successful novelist of manners and, along with him, helped preserve the artistic dignity of the novel This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1953.

This study reflects recent feminist interest in Wharton as a critic of American materialism and as a woman who personally escaped from the confines of the conventional, prosperous Eastern urban society of her time. Building upon the work of R. W. B. Lewis and C. G. Wolff, the author gives close readings of Wharton's best-known novels and traces her interpretation of changing social mores from the 1870s through the 1920s. Concludes that Wharton was not a "fossilized old New Yorker" but an independent, fearless seeker of the intelligent, creative life. ISBN 0-8386-3126-6 : $24.50.

Ironically, now that she is becoming recognized as a Modernist by some, and as perhaps the greatest American writer of her generation, the criticism often obfuscates more than it reveals. The reasons reside in critics' loyalties to various theoretical approaches, the objectivity of which are often compromised by political hopes. This volume not only traces and analyzes the development of Whartonian literary criticism in its historical and political contexts, but also allows Edith Wharton, herself a literary critic, to respond to various concepts through the author's deductions and extrapolations from Wharton's own words.

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.

The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton offers a series of fresh examinations of Edith Wharton's fiction written both to meet the interest of the student or general reader who encounters this major American writer for the first time and to be valuable to advanced scholars looking for new insights into her creative achievement. The essays cover Wharton's most important novels as well as some of her shorter fiction, and utilise both traditional and innovative critical techniques, applying the perspectives of literary history, feminist theory, psychology or biography, sociology or anthropology, or social history. The Introduction supplies a valuable review of the history of Wharton criticism which shows how her writing has provoked varying responses from its first publication, and how current interests have emerged from earlier ones. A detailed chronology of Wharton's life and publications and a useful bibliography are also provided.

Uncovers new evidence and presents new ideas that invite us to reconsider our understanding Edith Wharton's life and career.

A study of religion and philosophy in the novels and short stories of Edith Wharton, first published in 1995.

The Age of Innocence marks the pinnacle of Edith Wharton’s career as one of the finest American novelists of her era. The narrative follows Newland Archer, of upper-crust 1870s New York, whose passion for the mysterious Countess Ellen Olenska leads him to question the very foundations of his way of life. Written in the aftermath of World War I, the novel explores the psychological and cultural paradoxes of desire in a world undergoing unprecedented transformations. This edition includes a critical introduction and a range of appendices that contextualize the novel in terms of its modernist themes and tensions.

This book translates recent scholarship into pedagogy for teaching Edith Wharton’s widely celebrated and less-known fiction to students in the twenty-first century. It comprises such themes as American and European cultures, material culture, identity, sexuality, class, gender, law, history, journalism, anarchism, war, addiction, disability, ecology, technology, and social media in historical, cultural, transcultural, international, and regional contexts. It includes Wharton’s works compared to those of other authors, taught online, read in foreign universities, and studied in film adaptations.