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Edith Wharton considers the life of the early twentieth century American novelist and examines her fiction in opposition to both the male pastoral romance and the female domestic novel.
This stimulating reassessment of Edith Wharton by a leading authority on her work, will help to place Wharton's fiction against the nineteenth-century 'gendered' literary models. Like other American women writers, Wharton puts her protagonists within the social domestic world, but unlike them she emphasizes the restrictions imposed by the group on the individual.
The book opens with a discussion of Edith Wharton's life and then, in successive chapters, discusses her major social novels, including
The House of Mirth,
The Custom of the Country,
The Age of Innocence and
The Mother's Recompense. It ends with a useful review of the critical response to Wharton's writing.
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Editor's Preface
Edith Wharton's Life
Edith Wharton's Fiction
The House of Mirth and the Question of Women
The Custom of the Country and the Atlantic's Call
The Age of Innocence and the Bohemian Peril
The Mother's Recompense: Spectral Desire Edith Wharton and the Critics
Notes
Bibliography.
About the author
Katherine Joslin
Summary
This study considers Wharton's fiction as a reaction against both the male pastoral romance and the female domestic novel. It argues that her novels are concerned with the bond that exists between the individual and society rather than an escape from, or passive acceptance of, social constraints.
