| Description |
345 p. ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (p. 331-339) and index. |
| Contents |
"Schooling an intelligence": an ideological apprenticeship -- Skirting modernism: novels, novellas, and short stories (1900-1909) -- Apart from modernism? Mr. Proust, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Wharton (1910) -- Ethan Frome, modernism and a political argument (1911) -- Vulgarity, bohemia, and the reef (1912) -- John Jay Chapman, "social order and restraints": the custom of the country (1913) -- Money, politics, and art: questions of commerce, imperialism, and gender -- Politics and paradoxes: toryism, modernism and war. |
| Summary |
"Apart from Modernism explores the political and cultural influences that helped shape Edith Wharton. Robin Peel examines such subjects as her politics, her relationship to bohemianism and modernist experiment, and her idea of the good society through a discussion of her fiction 1900-1915, starting with a survey of the early novellas and novels such as The Valley of Decision, The House of Mirth, and The Fruit of the Tree, before concentrating in detail on the years which saw the publication of The Reef, Ethan Frome, and The Custom of the Country. Important issues such as Wharton's reading of gender, empire, and class form a central part of this discussion." "The study emphasizes the crucial role that Wharton's contact with Europe had on her writing, and the significance intellectually and politically of her relationship with Morton Fullerton and her reading of his books on politics. It locates Wharton in her period, surrounded as she was by discourses which called for political and social change, change which an outlook that Peel calls "American Toryism" made her reluctant to embrace. Her love of motorcars and her excitement about other technological developments such as aeroplanes was inspired by a feeling of exclusivity and not the democratization of culture, which she feared and condemned. France, England, Italy, and America formed the quartet of countries that contained the best and worst of culture, and Peel emphasizes how ironical it was that a writer whose ideological beliefs endorsed the importance of home, roots, and tradition should have spent so much of her life as a restless, apparently rootless traveler."--BOOK JACKET. |
| Subject |
Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937 -- Criticism and interpretation.
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Politics and literature -- United States -- History -- 20th century.
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Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937 -- Political and social views.
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Modernism (Literature) -- United States.
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| ISBN |
0838640796 (alk. paper) |
|
9780838640791 (alk. paper) |
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