The Edith Wharton Society is pleased to announce that co-directors of the 2020 EWS conference will be Margaret Jay Jesse and Meg Toth. Thank you, Meg and Jay, for taking on this important role. More information about the conference will be forthcoming in 2019.
On February 14, 2018, the Times Literary Supplement published a newly discovered lecture by Edith Wharton, “France and Its Allies at War: The Witnesses Speak,” translated by Virginia Ricard (University of Bordeaux). Professor Ricard is co-editor of volume 29, Translations and Adaptations, of the Complete Works of Edith Wharton, a 30-volume series under contract at Oxford University Press.
The entire lecture is online at https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/america-at-war-wharton/ (Image courtesy of this site.)
Read the rest of this interview at the Complete Works of Edith Wharton site, https://whartoncompleteworks.org
In France we have an extraordinary tool, Gallica, a digital library created by the Bibliothèque nationale. Like the Internet Archive, it constantly expands the amount of material it makes available and improves accessibility. Over the years, I have downloaded anything and everything concerning Wharton or by Wharton that I found on Gallica. “L’Amérique en guerre” was published in the Revue hébdomadaire on 2 March 1918, and the review was uploaded by Gallica in December 2013. I read the lecture, among other things, soon afterwards. But it was in Washington, in July 2016, as I listened to Alan Price’s paper that I realized just how interesting it was. So the credit really goes to Alan. When I began looking at the translation work required for the Complete Works of Edith Wharton, I realized that “L’Amérique en guerre” had never been published in English and so I set to work on it. As I did so, I thought 2018 seemed the right moment to publish it—just a hundred years after Wharton gave her lecture and a little over a hundred years after the United States entered the war—still an important event in Europe although I think all but forgotten in the United-States.
“L’Amérique en guerre” was part of a series organized in 1918 by the Société des conferences, that is, a lecture society that worked closely with the Revue hébdomadaire in which the lectures were regularly published. This particular lecture was one of ten called Paroles de témoins—The Witnesses Speak. The nine other speakers were politicians, members of the Church, and writers, all closely involved in the conflict for various reasons. I think is is pretty clear why the organisers asked Wharton to take part. She had influenced American opinion, which the French saw as an essential factor in the American decision to enter the war, and she had contributed to the war effort in France. So she was, in that sense, “a witness.”
Newly published lecture “France and Its Allies at War: The Witnesses Speak” translated by Virginia Ricard, Wharton scholar and an editor of Wharton’s translations in The Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Oxford University Press).
Read an interview with Virginia Ricard about this piece next week at the Complete Works of Edith Wharton site: http://whartoncompleteworks.org.
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/america-at-war-wharton/
On February 8, 1918, in a series called “France and Its Allies at War: The Witnesses Speak”, Edith Wharton gave a lecture in French to an audience of about 400. Why had the United States entered the war with such enthusiasm? How could Americans, who were only interested in money-making, be ready to fight? The lecture, which appears here for the first time in English and in edited form, was an attempt to answer these questions. It reveals Wharton’s interest in the early American settlers’ lasting contribution to democracy, and displays her wide – and generally unsuspected – knowledge of American history.
Virginia Ricard
There is a profound difference, a fundamental difference, between the French and the Americans: a difference of language, far greater than that which exists between races of Latin origin, whose languages draw on a common linguistic fund. When an Italian or a Spaniard needs to translate his ideas into your language, he finds an equivalent, or even a synonym, far more easily than we do. For the person of purely Anglo-Saxon origin, there is, apart from the difficulty of pronunciation, that of finding exact equivalents in French for her American thoughts. If I call your attention to this obstacle, it is not merely to beg your indulgence. Rather, it is because I was invited to speak to you of my country and one of the most delicate questions concerning the relations between our two peoples is precisely the problem caused by the difference between our languages. If the United States and France were near neighbours, this obstacle would be less troublesome, but we are obliged to converse through the intermediary of the press and government statements. Each time I see the translation of a speech or an official American Government statement in a French newspaper I fear a misunderstanding.
(Read the rest at the Times Literary Supplement).
Edith Wharton Society (EWS) Awards for 2018-2019
This award, formerly known as the “Edith Wharton Society Prize for a Beginning Scholar” and established in the fall of 2005, recognizes the best unpublished essay on Edith Wharton by a beginning scholar, advanced graduate students, independent scholars, and faculty members who have not held a tenure-track or full-time appointment for more than four years. The winning and second-place essays will be submitted for review and possible publication to the Editorial Board of the Edith Wharton Review, a peer-reviewed journal indexed in the MLA Bibliography and published by Penn State University Press. The author of the prize-winning essay will receive an award of $250. All entries will be considered for publication in the Edith Wharton Review as well as for the Elsa Nettels Prize. Submissions should be 20-30 pages and should follow the 8th edition MLA style, using endnotes, not footnotes. To submit an essay for the prize, e-mail it as an anonymized MS Word attachment, plus, as a separate attachment, a cover letter with your name, essay title, academic status, e-mail address, postal address, and the notation “Elsa Nettels Prize for Beginning Scholar.” Please be sure that the e-mail subject line clearly indicates “Elsa Nettels Prize for a Beginning Scholar” and send both attachments to the following address by June 30, 2018:
Dr. Paul Ohler
President, Edith Wharton Society
Department of English
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
paul.ohler@kpu.ca
In 2014, the Edith Wharton Society launched a prize for undergraduate research on Edith Wharton. We seek critical essays by undergraduates focusing on works by Wharton in all genres. Students at all undergraduate levels are eligible to submit. Papers should be 15 pages maximum. The winning essay will be published on the Edith Wharton Society website and the author will receive an award of $100. Electronic submissions are requested. To submit an essay for the prize, e-mail it as an anonymized MS Word attachment, plus, as a separate attachment, a cover letter with your name, essay title, undergraduate institution, the name of your faculty mentor, e-mail address, postal address, and the notation “Edith Wharton Undergraduate Research Prize.” Please be sure that the e-mail subject line clearly indicates “EWS Undergraduate Research Prize” and send both attachments to the following address by June 30, 2018:
Dr. Paul Ohler
President, Edith Wharton Society
Department of English
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
paul.ohler@kpu.ca
The Edith Wharton Society welcomes applications for an award for archival research on Edith Wharton. This award, in the amount of $500, is intended to enable a scholar to conduct research on Edith Wharton’s work at the various archives available (e.g., Wharton’s library at The Mount in Lenox, MA; the Wharton Collection at Yale University’s Beinecke Library; the Wharton papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, etc). Prospective fellows for the 2018-2019 award are asked to e-mail a research proposal (maximum length 5 single-spaced pages) and a CV by June 30, 2018, with the subject line “EWS Award for Archival Research” to:
Dr. Paul Ohler
President, Edith Wharton Society
Department of English
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
paul.ohler@kpu.ca
The research proposal should detail the overall research project, its particular contribution to Wharton scholarship, the preparation the candidate brings to the project, and the specific relevance that the selected archive has for its completion. The funds must be used for transportation, lodging, and other expenses related to archival research. Notification of the award will take place by July 30, 2018 and the award can be used from August 1, 2018 until July 30, 2019. A final report will be due September 1, 2019. The winner will be asked at that point to submit a short report essay to the Edith Wharton Review, which will briefly inform the readers of the EWR of the research done but will not be in the way of the winner publishing a scholarly article elsewhere as well.
The minutes from the EWS Board Meeting at MLA 2018 are available under Membership – EWS Business and also here: https://edithwhartonsociety.wordpress.com/membership/ews-business-2/2018-01-06-mla-board-meeting-minutes/
Edith Wharton’s Sense of Time
The Edith Wharton Society welcomes proposals related to Wharton’s explorations of temporalities, from the social to the natural, including but not limited to such paradigms as: punctuality/lateness; the historical/transhistorical; of an era/undefined by time; the timely/tardy; marking time/eluding time; the temporal/timeless; the geologic/anthropocenic; the linear/cyclical, and the dynastic/original. 300 word proposals by March 5; Melanie Dawson (mvdaws@wm.edu).
Drizou, Myrto, editor. Edith Wharton: Critical Insights. Salem Press, 2017.
