Download or read book Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton written by Kathy A. Fedorko and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2017-12-12 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation into Wharton’s extensive use and adaptation of the Gothic in her fiction. Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton is an innovative study that provides fresh insights into Wharton’s male characters while at the same time showing how Wharton’s imagining of a fe/male self evolves throughout her career. Using feminist archetypal theory and theory of the female Gothic, Kathy A. Fedorko shows how Wharton, in sixteen short stories and six major novels written during four distinct periods of her life, adopts and adapts Gothic elements as a way to explore the nature of feminine and masculine ways of knowing and being and to dramatize the tension between them Edith Wharton’s contradictory views of women and men—her attitudes toward the feminine and the masculine—reflect a complicated interweaving of family and social environment, historical time, and individual psychology. Studies of Wharton have exhibited this same kind of contradiction, with some seeing her as disparaging men and the masculine and others depicting her as disparaging women and the feminine. The use of Gothic elements in her fiction provided Wharton, who was often considered the consummate realist, with a way to dramatize the conflict between feminine and masculine selves as she experienced them and to evolve and alternative to the dualism. Fedorko’s work is unique in its careful consideration of Whartons’s sixteen Gothic works which are seldom discussed. Further, the revelation of how these Gothic stories are reflected in her major realistic novels. In the novels with Gothic texts, Wharton draws multiple parallels between male and female protagonists, indicating the commonalities between women and men and the potential for a female self. Eventually, in her last completed novel and her last short story, Wharton imagines human beings who are comfortable with both gender selves.
Download or read book The Age of Desire written by Jennie Fields and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For fans of The Paris Wife, a sparkling glimpse into the life of Edith Wharton and the scandalous love affair that threatened her closest friendship They say that behind every great man is a great woman. Behind Edith Wharton, there was Anna Bahlmann—her governess turned literary secretary and confidante. At the age of forty-five, despite her growing fame, Edith remains unfulfilled in a lonely, sexless marriage. Against all the rules of Gilded Age society, she falls in love with Morton Fullerton, a dashing young journalist. But their scandalous affair threatens everything in Edith’s life—especially her abiding ties to Anna. At a moment of regained popularity for Wharton, Jennie Fields brilliantly interweaves Wharton’s real letters and diary entries with her fascinating, untold love story. Told through the points of view of both Edith and Anna, The Age of Desire transports readers to the golden days of Wharton’s turn-of-the century world and—like the recent bestseller The Chaperone—effortlessly re-creates the life of an unforgettable woman.
Download or read book Ghosts written by Edith Wharton and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An elegantly hair-raising collection of Edith Wharton's ghost stories, selected and with a preface written by the author herself. No history of the American uncanny tale would be complete without mention of Edith Wharton, yet many of Wharton’s most dedicated admirers are unaware that she was a master of the form. In fact, one of Wharton’s final literary acts was assembling Ghosts, a personal selection of her most chilling stories, written between 1902 and 1937. In “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” the earliest tale included here, a servant’s dedication to her mistress continues from beyond the grave, and in “All Souls,” the last story Wharton wrote, an elderly woman treads the permeable line between life and the hereafter. In all her writing, Wharton’s great gift was to mercilessly illuminate the motives of men and women, and her ghost stories never stray far from the preoccupations of the living, using the supernatural to investigate such worldly matters as violence within marriage, the horrors of aging, the rot at the root of new fortunes, the darkness that stares back from the abyss of one’s own soul. These are stories to “send a cold shiver down one’s spine,” not to terrify, and as Wharton explains in her preface, her goal in writing them was to counter “the hard grind of modern speeding-up” by preserving that ineffable space of “silence and continuity,” which is not merely the prerogative of humanity but—“in the fun of the shudder”—its delight. Contents All Souls’ The Eyes Afterward The Lady’s Maid’s Bell Kerfol The Triumph of Night Miss Mary Pask Bewitched Mr. Jones Pomegranate Seed A Bottle of Perrier
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 Lady s Maid s Bell written by Edith Wharton and published by Createspace Independent Pub. This book was released on 2013-01-24 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: IT was the autumn after I had the typhoid. I'd been three months in hospital, and when I came out I looked so weak and tottery that the two or three ladies I applied to were afraid to engage me. Most of my money was gone, and after I'd boarded for two months, hanging about the employment-agencies, and answering any advertisement that looked any way respectable, I pretty nearly lost heart, for fretting hadn't made me fatter, and I didn't see why my luck should ever turn. It did though—or I thought so at the time. A Mrs. Railton, a friend of the lady that first brought me out to the States, met me one day and stopped to speak to me: she was one that had always a friendly way with her. She asked me what ailed me to look so white, and when I told her, "Why, Hartley," says she, "I believe I've got the very place for you. Come in to-morrow and we'll talk about it."
Download or read book The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton written by Edith Wharton and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2012-11-08 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This haunting anthology is an enthralling collection of chilling tales infused with Edith Wharton's masterful exploration of human psychology and the hidden recesses of the human heart. As a keen observer of human nature, Wharton weaves her ghostly tales with remarkable subtlety and psychological depth. Her ghosts are not mere apparitions but poignant manifestations of guilt, regret, and unrequited desires. Through her elegant prose and sharp wit, Wharton delves into the darkest corners of the human psyche, exploring themes of forbidden passions, societal constraints, and the persistent power of the past. Each setting serves as the backdrop for chilling encounters with the spectral realm. The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton is a testament to Wharton's versatility as a writer. The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, she imbues her tales with atmospheric tension, challenging the reader to question what lies beyond our mortal existence.
Download or read book Re Reading the Age of Innovation written by Louise Kane and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-28 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The period of 1830–1950 was an age of unprecedented innovation. From new inventions and scientific discoveries to reconsiderations of religion, gender, and the human mind, the innovations of this era are recorded in a wide range of literary texts. Rather than separating these texts into Victorian or modernist camps, this collection argues for a new framework that reveals how the concept of innovation generated forms of literary newness that drew novelists, poets, and other creative figures working across this period into dialogic networks of experiment. The 14 chapters in this volume explore how inventions like the rotary print press or hot air balloon and emergent debates about science, trade, and colonialism evolved new forms and genres. Through their examinations of a wide range of texts and writers—from well-known novelists like Conrad, Dickens, Hardy, and Woolf, to less canonical figures like Charlotte Mew, Elías Mar, and Walter Frances White—the chapters in this collection re-read these texts as part of an age of innovation characterized not by division and divide, but by collaboration and community.
Download or read book The House of Mirth written by Edith Wharton and published by Wordsworth Editions. This book was released on 2002 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The heroine of this novel is Lily Bart, whose goal is to secure a rich husband who can sustain her lifestyle. She operates in a world where social position is important, but money can buy it. Lily is redeemed by her clear view of the corrupt society which is her gilded cage.
Download or read book A Companion to the American Novel written by Alfred Bendixen and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-11-17 with total page 708 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring 37 essays by distinguished literary scholars, A Companion to the American Novel provides a comprehensive single-volume treatment of the development of the novel in the United States from the late 18th century to the present day. Represents the most comprehensive single-volume introduction to this popular literary form currently available Features 37 contributions from a wide range of distinguished literary scholars Includes essays on topics and genres, historical overviews, and key individual works, including The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, Beloved, and many more.
Download or read book The Buccaneers written by Edith Wharton and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1994-10-01 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edith Wharton's spellbinding final novel tells a story of love in the gilded age that crosses the boundaries of society—soon to be an original series on AppleTV+! “Brave, lively, engaging...a fairy-tale novel, miraculouly returned to life.”—The New York Times Book Review Set in the 1870s, the same period as Wharton's The Age of Innocence, The Buccaneers is about five wealthy American girls denied entry into New York Society because their parents' money is too new. At the suggestion of their clever governess, the girls sail to London, where they marry lords, earls, and dukes who find their beauty charming—and their wealth extremely useful. After Wharton's death in 1937, The Christian Science Monitor said, "If it could have been completed, The Buccaneers would doubtless stand among the richest and most sophisticated of Wharton's novels." Now, with wit and imagination, Marion Mainwaring has finished the story, taking her cue from Wharton's own synopsis. It is a novel any Wharton fan will celebrate and any romantic reader will love. This is the richly engaging story of Nan St. George and Guy Thwarte, an American heiress and an English aristocrat, whose love breaks the rules of both their societies.
Download or read book At Home at War written by Jennifer Anne Haytock and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study demonstrates that such literary divisions as war novel and domestic novel limit readers' understanding of the ways these categories rely on and respond to each other. Haytock argues that gender creates an ideological context through which both domesticity and war are viewed and understood; issues of home and violence are intricately related for U.S. authors who wrote about the First World War. Haytock explores what war and domestic texts represent in light of the deconstructionist said in its cultural and historical context and seeing what is not said. Readers take food, shelter, and clothing for granted, and yet the way we treat them is part of what allows us to define ourselves as civilized. In war novels and domestic novels by Temple Beiley, Ellen, Glasgow, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, John Dos Passons, Thomas Boyd, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty, the idea of home and domestic rituals contribute to the creation of war propaganda, the soldier's experience of war, and the home front's ability to confront the war after the fact. This approach helps literary criticism reject the separation of men's and women's writing, particularly but not only their writing about war.
Download or read book Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century written by Christine Gerhardt and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-06-11 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook offers students and researchers a compact introduction to the nineteenth-century American novel in the light of current debates, theoretical concepts, and critical methodologies. The volume turns to the nineteenth century as a formative era in American literary history, a time that saw both the rise of the novel as a genre, and the emergence of an independent, confident American culture. A broad range of concise essays by European and American scholars demonstrates how some of America‘s most well-known and influential novels responded to and participated in the radical transformations that characterized American culture between the early republic and the age of imperial expansion. Part I consists of 7 systematic essays on key historical and critical frameworks ― including debates aboutrace and citizenship, transnationalism, environmentalism and print culture, as well as sentimentalism, romance and the gothic, realism and naturalism. Part II provides 22 essays on individual novels, each combining an introduction to relevant cultural contexts with a fresh close reading and the discussion of critical perspectives shaped by literary and cultural theory.
Download or read book Kerfol written by Edith Wharton and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2018-04-05 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduction of the original: Kerfol by Edith Wharton
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature written by Mary Ellen Snodgrass and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an alphabetical reference guide detailing the lives and works of authors associated with Gothic literature.
Download or read book Dirty Work written by Ann Mattis and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dirty Work sheds light on the complex relationships between women employers and their household help in the early twentieth century through their representations in literature, including women’s magazines, conduct manuals, and particularly female-authored fiction. Domestic service brought together women from different classes, races, and ethnicities, and with it, a degree of social anxiety as upwardly mobile young women struggled to construct their identities in a changing world. The book focuses on the works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, Anzia Yezierska, and Fannie Hurst and their various depictions of the maid/mistress relationship, revealing “a feminized and racialized brand of class hegemony.” Modern servants became configured as racial, hygienic, and social threats to the emergent ideal of the nuclear family, and played critical rhetorical roles in first-wave feminism and the New Negro movements. Ann Mattis reveals how U.S. domestic service was the political unconscious of cultural narratives that attempted to define modern domesticity and progressive femininity in monolithic terms.
Download or read book Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism written by J. Haytock and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-04-28 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study imagines modernism as a series of conversations and locates Edith Wharton s voice in those debates.
Download or read book Gothic Re Visions written by Susan Wolstenholme and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gothic fiction usually has been perceived as the special province of women, an attraction often attributed to a thematics of woman-identified issues such as female sexuality, marriage, and childbirth. But why these issues? What is specifically "female" about "Gothic?" This book argues that Gothic modes provide women who write with special means to negotiate their way through their double status as women and as writers, and to subvert the power relationships that hinder women writers. Current theories of "gendered" observation complicate the idea that Gothic-marked fiction relies on composed, individual scenes and visual metaphors for its effect. The texts studied here--by Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and Edith Wharton--explode the authority of a unitary, centralized narrative gaze and establish instead a diffuse, multi-angled textual position for "woman." Gothic moments in these novels create a textualized space for the voice of a "woman writer," as well as inviting the response of a "woman reader."
