Reading Edith Wharton Through a Darwinian Lens

Reading Edith Wharton Through a Darwinian Lens
Author: Judith P. Saunders
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2014-01-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0786453656

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Beneath the polished surface of the genteel environments delineated in Wharton's fiction, characters are competing fiercely for desirable mates, questing for social status and resources, and plotting ruthlessly to advance their relatives' fortunes in life. This book identifies these and other evolutionary issues central to her fiction, demonstrating their significance in terms of character, setting, plot, and theme. Connections to existing Wharton criticism are made throughout the book, so that readers can see how an evolutionary perspective enriches, refutes, or reconfigures insights derived from other critical approaches.

Edith Wharton's Evolutionary Conception

Edith Wharton's Evolutionary Conception
Author: Paul J. Ohler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2013-10-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135511470

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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.

America's Darwin

America's Darwin
Author: Tina Gianquitto
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2014
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0820344486

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An engaging collection of interdisciplinary essays on the distinctive qualities of America's textual engagement with Darwinian evolutionary theory, especially in regard to On the Origin of Species, which highlights the influence of prevalent cultural anxieties on interpretation.

The New Edith Wharton Studies

The New Edith Wharton Studies
Author: Jennifer Haytock
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2019-12-19
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1108422691

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

Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism

Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism
Author: Meredith L. Goldsmith
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2016-09-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 081305592X

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"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

Teaching Edith Wharton’s Major Novels and Short Fiction

Teaching Edith Wharton’s Major Novels and Short Fiction
Author: Ferdâ Asya
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2021-05-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030527425

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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.

Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age

Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age
Author: Melanie V. Dawson
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2020-02-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813057418

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Providing a counterpoint to readings of modern American culture that focus on the cult of youth, Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age interrogates early twentieth-century literature’s obsessions with aging past early youth. Exploring the ways in which the aging process was understood as generating unequal privileges and as inciting intergenerational contests, this study situates constructions of age at the center of modern narrative conflicts. Dawson examines how representations of aging connect the work of Edith Wharton to writings by a number of modern authors, including Willa Cather, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Floyd Dell, Eugene O’Neill, and Gertrude Atherton. For these writers, age-based ideologies filter through narratives of mourning for youth lost in the Great War, the trauma connected to personal change, the contested self-determination of the aged, the perceived problem of middle-aged sexuality, fantasies of rejuvenation, and persistent patterns of patriarchal authority. The work of these writers shows that as the generational ascendancy of some groups was imagined to operate in tandem with disempowerment of others, the charged dynamics of age gave rise to contests about property and authority. Constructions of age-based values also reinforced gender norms, producing questions about personal value that were directed toward women of all ages. By interpreting Edith Wharton’s and her contemporaries’ works in relation to age-based anxieties, Dawson sets Wharton’s work at the center of a vital debate about the contested privileges associated with age in contemporary culture.

Edith Wharton in Context

Edith Wharton in Context
Author: Laura Rattray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2012-10-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107310814

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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.

Gale Researcher Guide for: Edith Wharton: Realist or Naturalist?

Gale Researcher Guide for: Edith Wharton: Realist or Naturalist?
Author: Myrto Drizou
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
Total Pages: 7
Release:
Genre: Study Aids
ISBN: 1535847891

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Gale Researcher Guide for: Edith Wharton: Realist or Naturalist? is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers

Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers
Author: Vike Martina Plock
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2017-06-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 147442743X

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An unprecedented sartorial revolution occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century when the tight-laced silhouettes of Victorian women gave way to the figure of the flapper. Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers demonstrates how five female novelists of the interwar period engaged with an emerging fashion discourse that concealed capitalist modernity's economic reliance on mass-manufactured, uniform-looking productions by ostensibly celebrating originality and difference. For Edith Wharton, Jean Rhys, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf fashion was never just the provider of guidelines on what to wear. Rather, it was an important concern, offering them opportunities to express their opinions about identity politics, about contemporary gender dynamics and about changing conceptions of authorship and literary productivity. By examining their published work and unpublished correspondence, this book investigates how the chosen authors used fashion terminology to discuss the possibilities available to women to express difference and individuality in a world that actually favoured standardised products and collective formations.