'The House of Mirth' is perhaps Edith Wharton's best-known and most frequently read novel. This casebook collects critical essays addressing a broad spectrum of topics and utilizing a range of critical and theoretical approaches.

Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) is a sharp and satirical, but also sensitive and tragic analysis of a young, single woman trying to find her place in a materialistic and unforgiving society. The House of Mirth offers a fascinating insight into the culture of the time and, as suggested by the success of recent film adaptations, it is also an enduring tale of love, ambition and social pressures still relevant today. Including a selection of illustrations from the original magazine publication, which offers a unique insight to what the contemporary reader would have seen, this volume also provides: an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of The House of Mirth a critical history, surveying the many interpretations of the text from publication to the present a selection of new critical essays on the The House of Mirth, by Edie Thornton, Katherine Joslin, Janet Beer, Elizabeth Nolan, Kathy Fedorko and Pamela Knights, providing a range of perspectives on the novel and extending the coverage of key critical approaches identified in the survey section cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism suggestions for further reading. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of The House of Mirth and seeking not only a guide to the novel, but a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds Wharton’s text.

Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) is a sharp and satirical, but also sensitive and tragic analysis of a young, single woman trying to find her place in a materialistic and unforgiving society. The House of Mirth offers a fascinating insight into the culture of the time and, as suggested by the success of recent film adaptations, it is also an enduring tale of love, ambition and social pressures still relevant today. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of The House of Mirth and seeking not only a guide to the novel, but a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds Wharton’s text.

The original CliffsNotes study guides offer expert commentary on major themes, plots, characters, literary devices, and historical background. The latest generation of titles in this series also feature glossaries and visual elements that complement the classic, familiar format. CliffsNotes on The House of Mirth takes you into the waning years of the Gilded Age and the moral bankruptcy of New York City's elite class. Edith Wharton's story of a woman—whose beauty causes men to desire to possess her and women to be jealous of her—reflects the complicated struggle of the individual against the social strictures of a powerful, and triumphant, moneyed class. This concise supplement to the satirically critical The House of Mirth, helps you understand the overall structure of the novel, actions and motivations of the characters, and the social and cultural perspectives of the author. Features that help you study include Chapter-by-chapter summaries and commentaries A character map that outline key characteristics and relationships Insightful character analyses A critical essay about the opulence and emptiness of the Gilded Age A review section that tests your knowledge Classic literature or modern-day treasure—you'll understand it all with expert information and insight from CliffsNotes study guides.

This volume, first published in 2001, makes distinctive claims for the historical, critical, and theoretical significance of Wharton's breakthrough work.

An exploration of the temporal function that "the Jew" plays in literature. No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines how the Hebraic myth, in which Jewishness became a metaphor for an ancient, pre-Christian past, was reimagined in nineteenth-century American realism. The Hebraic myth, while integral to a Protestant understanding of time, was incapable of addressing modern Jewishness, especially in the context of the growing social and national concern around the "Jewish problem." Sharon B. Oster shows how realist authors consequently cast Jews as caught between a distant past and a promising American future. In either case, whether creating or disrupting temporal continuity, Jewishness existed outside of time. No Place in Time complicates the debates over Eastern European immigration in the 1880s and questions of assimilation to a Protestant American culture. The first chapter begins in the world of periodicals, an interconnected literary culture, out of which Abraham Cahan emerged as a literary voice of Jewish immigrants caught between nostalgia and a messianic future outside of linear progression. Moving from the margins to the center of literary realism, the second chapter revolves around Henry James's modernization of the "noble Hebrew" as a figure of mediation and reconciliation. The third chapter extends this analysis into the naturalism of Edith Wharton, who takes up questions of intimacy and intermarriage, and places "the Jew" at the nexus of competing futures shaped by uncertainty and risk. A number of Jewish female perspectives are included in the fourth chapter that recasts plots of cultural assimilation through intermarriage in terms of time: if a Jewish past exists in tension with an American future, these writers recuperate the "Hebraic myth" for themselves to imagine a viable Jewish future. No Place in Time ends with a brief look at poet Emma Lazarus, whose understanding of Jewishness was distinctly modern, not nostalgic, mythical, or dead. No Place in Time highlights a significant shift in how Jewishness was represented in American literature, and, as such, raises questions of identity, immigration, and religion. This volume will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century American literature, American Jewish literature, and literature as it intersects with immigration, religion, or temporality, as well as anyone interested in Jewish studies.

Alexis de Tocqueville asserted that America had no truly great literature, and that American writers merely mimicked the British and European traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This new edited collection masterfully refutes Tocqueville's monocultural myopia and reveals the distinctive role American poetry and prose have played in reflecting and passing judgment upon the core values of American democracy. The essays, profiling the work of Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Updike, Edith Wharton, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Willa Cather, Walker Percy, and Tom Wolfe, reveal how America's greatest writers have acted as society's most ardent cheerleaders and its most penetrating critics. Christine Dunn Henderson's exciting new work offers literature as a portal through which to view the philosophical principles that animate America's political order and the mores which either reinforce or undermine them.

Using the lens of business history to contextualize the development of an American literary tradition, Truth Stranger than Fiction shows how African American literature and culture greatly influenced the development of realism, which remains one of the most significant genres of writing in the United States. More specifically, Truth Stranger than Fiction traces the influences of generic conventions popularized in slave narratives - such as the use of authenticating details, as well as dialect, and a frank treatment of the human body - in later realist writings. As it unfolds, Truth Stranger than Fiction poses and explores a set of questions about the shifting relationship between literature and culture in the United States from 1830-1930 by focusing on the evolving trend of literary realism. Beginning with the question, 'How might slave narratives - heralded as the first indigenous literature by Theodore Parker - have influenced the development of American Literature?' the book develops connections between an emerging literary marketplace, the rise of the professional writer, and literary realism.

A “delightful” (Vanity Fair) collection from the longest-running, most influential book review in America, featuring its best, funniest, strangest, and most memorable coverage over the past 125 years. Since its first issue on October 10, 1896, The New York Times Book Review has brought the world of ideas to the reading public. It is the publication where authors have been made, and where readers first encountered the classics that have enriched their lives. Now the editors have curated the Book Review’s dynamic 125-year history, which is essentially the story of modern American letters. Brimming with remarkable reportage and photography, this beautiful book collects interesting reviews, never-before-heard anecdotes about famous writers, and spicy letter exchanges. Here are the first takes on novels we now consider masterpieces, including a long-forgotten pan of Anne of Green Gables and a rave of Mrs. Dalloway, along with reviews and essays by Langston Hughes, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Nora Ephron, and more. With scores of stunning vintage photographs, many of them sourced from the Times’s own archive, readers will discover how literary tastes have shifted through the years—and how the Book Review’s coverage has shaped so much of what we read today.

While it is reasonable to assume that our national literature would offer a fertile field in which to explore the interaction between the ideological and psychological dimensions of American life, critics generally have kept these two domains separate, and the dominant model has consisted of an archaic notion of the individual in society.