Download or read book The Architectural Imagination of Edith Wharton written by Annette Benert and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edith Wharton has recently returned to prominence as a major American novelist. But few have taken her architectural work as seriously as she herself took it, or noticed its effects on her career. Two early architectural books and three travel works give sustained critical attention to the built environment. Early novels graphically portray the physical miseries of the poor and marginalized and their course in hierarchies of class and gender. By contrast, her letters consistently celebrate the tastes and manners of the elite. At its best, her fiction embodies this tension - the beauty and grace of elegant houses and public spaces, juxtaposed to their effects on those under their control. This book tracks Wharton's literary and architectural work in tandem, revealing their complex relationship. It also foregrounds the odd symmetry of her career, which began and ended in fierce attachment to traditional values, moved from delight in Italy to despair for France, and centered on the brilliantly crafted structures and spaces of the prewar novels. Annette Larson Benert is Associate Professor of English at DeSales University.
Download or read book The Memory of Architecture in Edith Wharton s Travel Writings written by Ágnes Zsófia Kovács and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-09-13 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edith Wharton was not only the author of novels and short stories but also of drama, poetry, autobiography, interior decoration, and travel writing. This study focuses on Wharton’s symbolic representations of architecture in her travel writings. It shows how a network of allusions to travel writing and art history books influenced Wharton’s representations of architectural and natural spaces. The book demonstrates Wharton’s complex relationship to works of art historians (John Ruskin, Émile Mâle, Arthur C. Porter) and travel authors (Wolfgang Goethe, Henry Adams, Henry James) in the trajectory of her travel writing. Kovács surveys how the acknowledgment of Wharton’s sources sheds light both on the author’s model of aesthetic understanding and scenic architectural descriptions, and how the shock of the Great War changed Wharton’s travel destinations but not her symbolic view of architecture as a mediator of things past. Wharton’s symbolic representations of architecture provide a new key to her travel writings.
Download or read book Edith Wharton at Home written by Richard Guy Wilson and published by The Monacelli Press, LLC. This book was released on 2012-09-04 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mount, Edith Wharton’s country place in the Berkshires, is truly an autobiographical house. There Wharton wrote some of her best-known and successful novels, including Ethan Frome and House of Mirth. The house itself, completed in 1902, embodies principles set forth in Wharton's famous book The Decoration of Houses, and the surrounding landscape displays her deep knowledge of Italian gardens. Wandering the grounds of this historic home, one can see the influence of Wharton’s inimitable spirit in its architecture and design, just as one can sense the Mount’s impact on the extraordinary life of Edith Wharton herself. The Mount sits in the rolling landscape of the Berkshire Hills, with views overlooking Laurel Lake and all the way out to the mountains. At the turn of the century, Lenox and Stockbridge were thriving summer resort communities, home to Vanderbilts, Sloanes, and other prominent families of the Gilded Age. At once a leader and a recorder of this glamorous society, Edith Wharton stands at the pinnacle of turn of the twentieth-century American literature and social history. The Mount was crucial to her success, and the story of her life there is filled with gatherings of literary figures and artists. Edith Wharton at Home presents Wharton’s life at The Mount in vivid detail with authoritative text by Richard Guy Wilson and archival images, as well as new color photography of the restoration of The Mount and its spectacular gardens. "The Mount was to give me country cares and joys, long happy rides and drives through the wooded lanes of that loveliest region, the companionship of dear friends, and the freedom from trivial obligations, which was necessary if I was to go on with my writing. The Mount was my first real home . . . its blessed influence still lives in me." —Edith Wharton, 1934
Download or read book Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism written by Meredith L. Goldsmith and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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
Download or read book Edith Wharton and Genre written by Laura Rattray and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on extensive new archival research, Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction offers the first study of Wharton’s full engagement with original writing in genres outside those with which she has been most closely identified. So much more than an acclaimed novelist and short story writer, Wharton is reconsidered in this book as a controversial playwright, a gifted poet, a trailblazing travel writer, an innovative and subversive critic, a hugely influential design writer, and an author who overturned the conventions of autobiographical form. Her versatility across genres did not represent brief sidesteps, temporary diversions from what has long been read as her primary role as novelist. Each was pursued fully and whole-heartedly, speaking to Wharton’s very sense of herself as an artist and her connected vision of artistry and art. The stories of these other Edith Whartons, born through her extraordinary dexterity across a wide range of genres, and their impact on our understanding of her career, are the focus of this new study, revealing a bolder, more diverse, subversive and radical writer than has long been supposed.
Download or read book Edith Wharton written by Theresa Craig and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating volume unites Wharton's personal history with discussion of her design theory, the elaborate settings she created in her fiction, and the design of her own residences, including exteriors, interiors, and gardens. Illustrated with an engaging combination of lavish new color photography and charming historical documents, it offers a unique collection that captures Wharton's timeless style.
Download or read book Edith Wharton in Context written by Laura Rattray and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-08 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays examines the various social, cultural and historical contexts surrounding Edith Wharton's popular and prolific literary career.
Download or read book Wharton Hemingway and the Advent of Modernism written by Lisa Tyler and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-04-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism is the first book to examine the connections linking two major American writers of the twentieth century, Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway. In twelve critical essays, accompanied by a foreword from Wharton scholar Laura Rattray and a critical introduction by volume editor Lisa Tyler, contributors reveal the writers’ overlapping contexts, interests, and aesthetic techniques. Thematic sections highlight modernist trends found in each author’s works. To begin, Peter Hays and Ellen Andrews Knodt argue for reading Wharton as a modernist writer, noting how her works feature characteristics that critics customarily credit to a younger generation of writers, including Hemingway. Since Wharton and Hemingway each volunteered for humanitarian medical service in World War I, then drew upon their experiences in subsequent literary works, Jennifer Haytock and Milena Radeva-Costello analyze their powerful perspectives on the cataclysmic conflict traditionally viewed as marking the advent of modernism in literature. In turn, Cecilia Macheski and Sirpa Salenius consider the authors’ passionate representations of Italy, informed by personal sojourns there, in which they observed its beautiful landscapes and culture, its liberating contrast with the United States, and its period of fascist politics. Linda Wagner-Martin, Lisa Tyler, and Anna Green focus on the complicated gender politics embedded in the works of Wharton and Hemingway, as evidenced in their ideas about female agency, sexual liberation, architecture, and modes of transportation. In the collection’s final section, Dustin Faulstick, Caroline Chamberlin Hellman, and Parley Ann Boswell address suggestive intertextualities between the two authors with respect to the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, their serialized publications in Scribner’s Magazine, and their affinities with the literary and cinematic tradition of noir. Together, the essays in this engaging collection prove that comparative studies of Wharton and Hemingway open new avenues for understanding the pivotal aesthetic and cultural movements central to the development of American literary modernism.
Download or read book Teaching Edith Wharton s Major Novels and Short Fiction written by Ferdâ Asya and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-13 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Edith Wharton s The Custom of the Country written by Laura Rattray and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together leading Wharton scholars from Europe, and North America, this volume offers the first ever collection of essays on Edith Wharton's 1913 tour de force, The Custom of the Country.
Download or read book Edith Wharton The House of Mirth as a Portrait of the City written by Nicole Schindler and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2007-08 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Potsdam (Anglistik / Amerikanistik), course: HS: Zwischen 'White City' und 'Slum Fiction' - Die Gro stadt in der amerikanischen Literatur am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts, 39 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In this paper we will describe the ambivalent relationship between American novelist Edith Wharton and the American city. Wharton is concerned with the lives of a rather closed set of people, namely the so called "old families" of New York. In Wharton's works, the world of the working poor is an invisible one. Although employees, servants, and maids were constantly present in and around the houses of the so called leisure class, they do not gain an independent voice, their struggle is being left untold. Wharton is interested in how the people she understood best, the families who inhabited society's highest valued spots, managed their situation. Edith Wharton's view of the architectural status quo and the newest developments in her city has to be called ambiguous. She relished the Beaux Art architecture of grandeur and at the same time she despised everything that screamed newly-rich to her. Anti-Semitism is a topic in this paper, because it became a component of New York's bourgeois identity as wealthy Jewish families were perceived to present a challenge to this high status group. Questions we were, amongst others, concerned with are: What effect had the modern city life on the best established class? How were the customs and modalities of these people affected by the tremendous developments around them? And how did (gendered) individuals react to the entrance wish of the newly rich into their inner circles? In other words, the way in which in- and exclusion from a certain group worked, how these were executed and what the potentiality of a change in status meant for the mind of the involved characters is Edith Wharton's central concer
Download or read book Venice and the Cultural Imagination written by Michael O'Neill and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the era of the Grand Tour, Venice was the cultural jewel in the crown of Europe and the epitome of decadence. This edited collection of eleven essays draws on a range of disciplines and approaches to ask how Venice’s appeal has affected Western culture since 1800.
Download or read book Extreme Domesticity written by Susan Fraiman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Domesticity gets a bad rap. We associate it with stasis, bourgeois accumulation, banality, and conservative family values. Yet in Extreme Domesticity, Susan Fraiman reminds us that keeping house is just as likely to involve dislocation, economic insecurity, creative improvisation, and queered notions of family. Her book links terms often seen as antithetical: domestic knowledge coinciding with female masculinity, feminism, and divorce; domestic routines elaborated in the context of Victorian poverty, twentieth-century immigration, and new millennial homelessness. Far from being exclusively middle-class, domestic concerns are shown to be all the more urgent and ongoing when shelter is precarious. Fraiman's reformulation frees domesticity from associations with conformity and sentimentality. Ranging across periods and genres, and diversifying the archive of domestic depictions, Fraiman's readings include novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Sandra Cisneros, Jamaica Kincaid, Leslie Feinberg, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka; Edith Wharton's classic decorating guide; popular women's magazines; and ethnographic studies of homeless subcultures. Recognizing the labor and know-how needed to produce the space we call "home," Extreme Domesticity vindicates domestic practices and appreciates their centrality to everyday life. At the same time, it remains well aware of domesticity's dark side. Neither a romance of artisanal housewifery nor an apology for conservative notions of home, Extreme Domesticity stresses the heterogeneity of households and probes the multiplicity of domestic meanings.
Download or read book Domesticity and Design in American Women s Lives and Literature written by Caroline Hellman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Domesticity and Design in American Women’s Lives and Literature explores the ways in which four American women writers from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century inhabited domestic space and portrayed it in their work. Hellman explores independent female authors who had intriguing and autonomous relationships with home, relocating frequently either to begin the creative processes of designing and decorating anew or to avoid domestic obligation altogether by remaining in transit. She also looks at how women authors wrote female characters into existence who had strikingly different relationships with home, and contended with profound burdens of housekeeping in an oppressive domestic sphere. The disjunction between the authors' individual existences and the characters to whom they gave life reveals multiple narratives about women at home in nineteenth- and twentieth- century America. This interdisciplinary inquiry undertakes a dual treatment of domesticity in an effort to synthesize a more complete understanding of the relationships between social history and literary accomplishment. Syncretising domestic literature with domestic practice, Hellman appraises the ways in which the authors appropriate domestic rhetoric to address issues of political import: economy, health, and social welfare in the case of Stowe, material feminism for Alcott, the landscape for Cather, and World War I for Wharton.
Download or read book Pastoral Cosmopolitanism in Edith Wharton s Fiction written by Margarida Cadima and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2023-07-11 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American novelist Edith Wharton (1862–1937) is best known today for her tales of the city and the experiences of patrician New Yorkers in the “Gilded Age.” This book pushes against the grain of critical orthodoxy by prioritizing other “species of spaces” in Wharton’s work. For example, how do Wharton’s narratives represent the organic profusion of external nature? Does the current scholarly fascination with the environmental humanities reveal previously unexamined or overlooked facets of Wharton’s craft? I propose that what is most striking about her narrative practice is how she utilizes, adapts, and translates pastoral tropes, conventions, and concerns to twentieth-century American actualities. It is no accident that Wharton portrays characters returning to, or exploring, various natural localities, such as private gardens, public parks, chic mountain resorts, monumental ruins, or country-estate “follies.” Such encounters and adventures prompt us to imagine new relationships with various geographies and the lifeforms that can be found there. The book addresses a knowledge gap in Wharton and the environmental humanities, especially recent debates in ecocriticism. The excavation of Wharton's words and the background of her narratives with an eye to offering an ecocritical reading of her work is what the book focuses on.
Download or read book Haunting Realities written by Monika Elbert and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2017-06-20 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative collection of essays examining the sometimes paradoxical alignment of Realism and Naturalism with the Gothic in American literature to highlight their shared qualities Following the golden age of British Gothic in the late eighteenth century, the American Gothic’s pinnacle is often recognized as having taken place during the decades of American Romanticism. However, Haunting Realities explores the period of American Realism—the end of the nineteenth century—to discover evidence of fertile ground for another age of Gothic proliferation. At first glance, “Naturalist Gothic” seems to be a contradiction in terms. While the Gothic is known for its sensational effects, with its emphasis on horror and the supernatural, the doctrines of late nineteenth-century Naturalism attempted to move away from the aesthetics of sentimentality and stressed sobering, mechanistic views of reality steeped in scientific thought and the determinism of market values and biology. Nonetheless, what binds Gothicism and Naturalism together is a vision of shared pessimism and the perception of a fearful, lingering presence that ominously haunts an impending modernity. Indeed, it seems that in many Naturalist works reality is so horrific that it can only be depicted through Gothic tropes that prefigure the alienation and despair of modernism. In recent years, research on the Gothic has flourished, yet there has been no extensive study of the links between the Gothic and Naturalism, particularly those which stem from the early American Realist tradition. Haunting Realities is a timely volume that addresses this gap and is an important addition to scholarly work on both the Gothic and Naturalism in the American literary tradition.
Download or read book Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts written by Emily J. Orlando and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explores Edith Wharton's career-long concern with a 19th-century visual culture that limited female artistic agency and expression. Wharton repeatedly invoked the visual arts as a medium for revealing the ways that women's bodies have been represented (as passive, sexualized, infantalized, sickly, dead). Well-versed in the Italian masters, Wharton made special use of the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly its penchant for producing not portraits of individual women but instead icons onto whose bodies male desire is superimposed.
