The New Edith Wharton Studies

Description

The New Edith Wharton Studies uncovers new evidence and presents new ideas that invite us to reconsider our understanding of one of America's most highly acclaimed, versatile, and prolific writers. The volume addresses themes that have previously been missed or underdeveloped, and examines areas where previous scholarship does not take account of key, contemporary issues: Wharton and ecocriticism, Wharton and queer studies, Wharton and animal studies, Wharton and whiteness, and Wharton and contemporary psychology. Essays explore Wharton's treatment of the poor in her emerging career, the ways in which French thinkers helped her envision community, the importance of Greece to Wharton, her transnationalism, the ongoing revelations of the author's archives, and new perspectives on her agency in the literary marketplace. It addresses key themes and examines contemporary issues, while reassessing Edith Wharton's life and career.

Jennifer Haytock is the author of At Home, At War: Domesticity and World War I in American Literature (2003), Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism (2008), The Middle Class in the Great Depression: Popular Women's Novels in the 1930s (2013), and The Routledge Introduction to American War Literature (2018). Laura Rattray is Reader in American Literature and Director of the Centre of American Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her work on Wharton includes Edith Wharton in Context (Cambridge, 2012), The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton (2009) and the Oxford World Classics edition of Summer (2015).

'... the best of these essays point toward a rejuvenation of the old in ways that allow Wharton fans to gain a deeper understanding of this complex and often misunderstood woman and artist.' S. Batcos, Choice