Conference Announcement: EWS Roundtable Participants at SAMLA

SAMLA:  https://samla.memberclicks.net/

The Edith Wharton Society will be holding a roundtable at SAMLA (South Atlantic Modern Language Association) on The Gilded Age in the Twenty-First Century: Edith Wharton’s Continuing Relevance. Join us for the conversation on Saturday, November 4, 2017, 1:45-3:15 PM (Session 9-24) in Piedmont 8 at the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, Georgia.

With the roundtable format, we’ll have plenty of time for a wide-ranging conversation about Wharton and the continuing “re-mediation” of her work in contemporary culture. SAMLA’s theme this year isHigh Art/Low Art: Borders and Boundaries in Popular Culture. Our roundtable includes three panelists: Alexis Williams, Middle Tennessee State University, on “Lilies, Dandelions, and the Price of Privilege: Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Kohan’s Orange is the New Black,” Mary Carney, University of North Georgia, on “Re-Framing Wharton: Interpreting Wharton’s Milieu via Modern Photography,” and Monica Miller, Middle Georgia State University on “Finding Edith Wharton: Archival Discoveries and the Popular Imagination.” Join us to share your insights about Wharton and popular culture.

 

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EW Expert on In Morocco needed for article

From Abbie Kozolchyk:

I’m a journalist who’ll soon be embarking on a trip—and article—based on Wharton’s time in Morocco. I’m wondering if anyone at the Society happens to specialize in this chapter of her life, or could recommend an appropriate scholar. I’d be looking for some background context, as well as some quotes for the story.

Many thanks in advance,

Abbie Kozolchyk

akozolchyk@gmail.com

From Ferda Asya: Contribute to a Modern Language Association (MLA) Approaches Volume on Teaching Edith Wharton’s Works

Contribute to a Modern Language Association (MLA) Approaches Volume on Teaching Edith Wharton’s Works

The volume Approaches to Teaching the Works of Edith Wharton, edited by Ferdâ Asya (Professor of English,111A Bakeless Center for the Humanities, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, 400 East Second Street, Bloomsburg, PA 17815; fasya@bloomu.edu), is now in development in the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature.

You can contribute to the volume by completing a survey about your experiences of teaching Wharton’s works.

You also can propose an essay for the volume. Information about proposing an essay is available at the end of the survey.

The survey for Approaches to Teaching the Works of Edith Wharton is also available here:https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/att-Wharton

From Paul Ohler: 2017-2018 EWS Award Winners

I’m writing to inform you of the results of the 2017-2018 EWS Awards competition. We had an excellent group of essays for both the Elsa Nettels Prize and the Undergrad Research Prize, and I wish to thank our judges Jennifer Haytock, Madeleine Vala, and Meg Toth for their willingness to assess the essays and the proposals for the Archival Research Award. The winners have been notified.

Deborah Molloy, a doctoral student at the University of Kent, has been awarded the Edith Wharton Society Elsa Nettels Prize for a Beginning Scholar for her essay “In the Cave of the Oracle: Feminine Tragedy in The House of Mirth and Mrs Manstey’s View.”

Aidan Selmer an English Major at the College of William and Mary has won the Edith Wharton Society Undergraduate Research Prize for his essay “Risk and the Self-Fashioning Women in Wharton’s House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and Summer.”

Myrto Drizou, Associate Professor of English at Valdosta State University is the recipient of the Edith Wharton Society Award for Archival Research for her project “Wharton’s Odyssey and Mythologizing the Modern in American and Greek Literary Naturalisms”

Best to you all,

Paul​

Paul Ohler Ph.D.

Department of English

Kwantlen Polytechnic University

12666-72nd Avenue

Surrey, British Columbia

V3W 2M8

Canada

 

President, Edith Wharton Society

Associate Editor, Edith Wharton Review

From Laura Rattray: The Edith Wharton Writing Competition

The Edith Wharton Writing Competition

We hope you may have heard about an Edith Wharton workshop at Glasgow University on Wednesday 4 October – free, friendly, open to all: https://transatlanticladies.wordpress.com/blog/

To tie in with the workshop, we’re holding a competition. Again, it’s open to everyone, so whether you’re in Glasgow or further afield, we would love to hear from you. If you can’t join us for the workshop on the day, take part another way with this competition. (We want lots of entries from workshop attendees too of course.) And, yes, there will be prizes!

There are two options for the competition. We would like you either to write a summary alternative ending to any work by Wharton, or a sequel. Your entry can be anything from a single sentence to a passage of up to 250 words. It can be any style, any genre: prose, verse, comic, serious …let your imagination roam.

Have you sometimes wished a work by Edith Wharton ended differently? Now’s your chance! Or have you sometimes wondered what might have happened after the final page? Let us know…

In alternative Wharton narratives, does The House of Mirth’s Lily Bart marry Rosedale, marry Selden to live un/happily ever after, marry neither? Move in with Gerty and learn to embrace dinginess? Does The Custom of the Country’s Undine achieve her latest wish and become an ambassador’s wife?  Does Summer’s Lawyer Royall get up from the armchair only to be stabbed by Charity with the brooch? Could there even be a happy ending to Ethan Frome – or is that beyond all our imaginations?  The choice is yours!

Whatever your “take”, we’d love to hear from you. Please email us your entries, subject heading “Wharton competition”, giving your name and location to transatlantic.women@gmail.com by Friday 29 September. We’re delighted that our Wharton speakers at the workshop have agreed to act as judges for the competition. We’ll be announcing the winners at the workshop, and posting the decisions online shortly after. We’d love to post some of our favourite entries on the TLW site (with first name only, and general location), so unless you tell us otherwise in your emailed entry, we take it that you are happy for us to do this and to share your narrative.

That’s it! Happy writing. Don’t forget: deadline Friday 29 September. We’re looking forward to travelling with you to other Wharton worlds….

 

iBerkshires: Unpublished Edith Wharton Play Discovered by Scholars

Unpublished Edith Wharton Play Discovered by Scholars

LENOX, Mass. — Two scholars have made a new archival discovery: a previously unknown, original, full-length play by Edith Wharton called “The Shadow of a Doubt.”

The location of the discovery at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin was unexpected. Wharton scholars have been traveling to the Ransom Center for more than three decades to research Wharton’s papers. The source of their interest, however, was the author’s correspondence to her lover, Morton Fullerton. What scholars missed was hidden, in plain sight, in the center’s Playscripts and Promptbooks Collection (Performing Arts): two typescript copies of “The Shadow of a Doubt” by Edith Wharton.

The Edith Wharton Review, published by Penn State University Press, have published this finding, by Laura Rattray, a reader in American literature at the University of Glasgow, and Mary Chinery, a professor of English at Georgian Court University in New Jersey, in a journal article titled “The Shadow of a Doubt: A Play in Three Acts by Edith Wharton.” The article includes the play in its entirety.

The play, set in England, includes Wharton’s signature social realism and use of dramatic irony and wit to satirize social privilege and affluence. The play does take a decidedly dark and controversial turn into a world of extortion, mistrust, deception, and the revelation of an act claimed alternately as euthanasia and as murder.

Rattray and Chinery have been able to establish that “The Shadow of a Doubt” was not only completed, but in production by early 1901 with theatrical impresario Charles Frohman, and with Elsie de Wolfe in the leading role. For reasons not yet known, the production was abandoned.

More at http://www.iberkshires.com/story/54690/Unpublished-Edith-Wharton-Play-Discovered-by-Scholars.html

NY Times: Unknown Edith Wharton Play Surfaces

Unknown Edith Wharton Play Surfaces

In 2009, a cache of letters from the young Edith Wharton to her governess caused a stir when they turned up at auction. Now, an archive in Texas has yielded another startling Wharton discovery: an entirely unknown play.

“The Shadow of a Doubt,” Wharton’s only known finished play and the first full work by her to surface in 25 years, was set to be staged in New York in early 1901, before the production was abandoned for unknown reasons and forgotten. It survived in two typescripts held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, where it was discovered by Laura Rattray of the University of Glasgow and Mary Chinery of Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Ms. Rattray and Ms. Chinery unveiled their discovery in the recent issue of The Edith Wharton Review.

The three-act play, about a nurse who marries a wealthy man, went unmentioned in Wharton’s 1934 memoir, “A Backward Glance,” as well as in the major biographies of her. The two researchers tracked it down after noticing a cryptic reference to its title in a 1901 letter.

“Well before the publication of her first novel, we can now ascertain that Wharton was establishing herself as a playwright, deeply engaged in both the creative and business aspects of the theater,” Ms. Rattray said in a news release.

(Read the rest at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/theater/edith-wharton-play-surfaces-the-shadow-of-a-doubt.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share)