Boyd, Ailsa. ‘Some Americans in the ‘House Beautiful’: Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde, and Aestheticism.’ Volupté Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, Vol. 6.2
Online ISSN: 2515-0073
<https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.v.v6i2.1749.g1861>
<https://journals.gold.ac.uk/index.php/volupte/article/view/1749>
Valerie M. Smith, “Edith Wharton’s Position on the Real in A Motor-Flight Through France: Arthur Schopenhauer and Aesthetic-Sublime Contemplation,” English Studies
Eprint version:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/5VPJVQGJQTZHR3D78TEM/full?target=10.1080/0013838X.2023.2273137
“Edith Wharton and Film.” The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton, ed. Emily Orlando. Bloomsbury Press, 2023. 117-134.
Edith Wharton’s novels are filled with references to motion pictures and moviemaking, as critics have shown. Drawing on early film history, as well as readings of the films themselves, this essay analyzes available scenarios and contemporary publicity to contextualize Wharton’s films as the audiences of her time would have understood them including now-lost silent films that were made during her lifetime such as The House of Mirth, The Glimpses of the Moon, and The Age of Innocence or those that are largely inaccessible, such as The Marriage Playground. The phases of adaptations of Wharton’s work from the silent era to the golden age of Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s, to the television adaptations of the 1950s and 1960s, and up to the modern Wharton revival of the 1990s and 2000s reveal the ways in which the treatment of Wharton’s themes was at times too revolutionary for her own day but surprisingly prescient for our own.
Singley, Carol, Frederick Wegener, and Donna Campbell. “The Complete Works of Edith Wharton: New Discoveries.” The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton, ed. Emily Orlando. Bloomsbury Press, 2023. 269-286.
The Complete Works of Edith Wharton (CWEWh) is being published in thirty volumes, in print and online, by Oxford University Press, in accordance with current standards in textual editing; and with an open-access digital component reflecting the latest developments in the digital humanities. CWEWh, with its full critical and textual introductions, notes, and emendations, makes reliable texts of all of Wharton’s published and unpublished writing available for the first time; organizes her writing generically and chronologically in new ways; allows readers to chart her compositional processes; and highlights discoveries of new Wharton texts and translations through archival research.
Carney, Mary Agnes. “’Improvised Chase’: Notes on Wharton Studies.” Edith Wharton Review, vol. 37, no. 1, 2021, 1-43.
In 2014, a cluster of essays celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the Edith Wharton Review. This bibliographic article provides an overview of significant events, archival findings, major books, and select journal articles published since that issue. While length restrictions prevent the inclusion of all the fine studies from 2014 to 2020, this article outlines trends related to the journal’s move to a more prestigious home, the upcoming complete works by a major university press, the remarkable harvest of archival research, the long-awaited rise of digital humanities for our author, and select single-author books and essay collections that have contributed fresh perspectives and a more holistic portrait of Wharton and her writings. Scholars undertake a remarkable range of approaches that include genre, identity, and comparative studies, and considerations of geography and periodization. Wharton is more fully realized as a figure spanning the eras of realism, naturalism, and modernism, holding dialog with her contemporaries across these decades.
Book chapter:
Ricard, V. “Edith Wharton and Pleasure”. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton. Ed. Emily Orlando. Bloomsbury, 2022.
Online journal article:
Ricard, V. “Edith Wharton, Translator” Passeurs de la littérature des États-Unis en France. Transatlantica, 2022. https://doi.org/10.4000/transatlantica.19863
https://anthempress.com/whartonian-landscapes-hb
This book sets forth how the “greening” of Wharton’s private and public writings contributes to exciting strands in cultural geography and recent postcolonial theory: for example, biological and political constructions of citizenship, mobility, race, and nation; hospitality and hostility toward the “Other”; fraught experiences of exile and competing conceptions of home/land; trans/national selfhood; the figure of the nomad, the outcast, or the wanderer. Ultimately, it will address this question: What are the issues, broadly speaking what motivates an ecocriticism, how does that address the challenges of cultural geography, why can we uncover meaning by turning to Wharton? The argument made is that a reading of Wharton’s fiction can help reveal how to understand those issues. This book situates Wharton as an author who is acutely responsive to pastoral tropes and terrain, among other species of spaces. She addresses the affective and geographical resonances of such sites, especially sparsely populated localities and landforms—voguish mountain resorts, private ornamental gardens, lush public parks, monumental and “sham” ruins—which offered pampered American socialites a brief escape from the “welter.” I wish to complicate popular perceptions of “Wharton’s world”—reinforced by numerous handsomely produced cinematic and television adaptations of her novels—as one rooted in often-opulent domestic interiors with their waspish social cliques, strict rules of politesse, and elaborate hierarchies.
Indeed, one of the central aims of this book is to treat pastoral as a kind of palimpsest—a “parchment” upon which successive generations of artist-pilgrims have etched their impressions, constantly revising its imagery, formal procedures, and lyrical effects. This notion of the palimpsest also reinforces how my research seeks to extend the range of Wharton studies. First of all, my close reading of selected texts adds another “layer” of sophistication to the ever-evolving field of ecocriticism, whose core ideas and critical standpoints have assumed both an urgency and galvanizing potency given the seismic upheaval to our material localities around the globe—some of the most damaging tornadoes in US history; flooding in the American Midwest; devastating earthquakes in Haiti, China, and Japan; stronger and more extensive wildfires in the American Southwest.
Edith Wharton, A Son at the Front, edited, introduction, and explanatory notes, in the Oxford World’s Classics series (2023).
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-son-at-the-front-9780198859550?cc=us&lang=en&
This new edition of Wharton’s First World War novel provides a corrected text, scholarly introduction, extensive explanatory notes, two maps keyed to the text, and a volume-specific chronology and bibliography.
“Edith Wharton and Willa Cather: Beyond ‘Surface Differences.’” In The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton, ed. Emily Orlando; Bloomsbury (UK), 2022.
Abstract: Edith Wharton and Willa Cather: Beyond “Surface Differences”
Although they are both giants of American literature, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather (1873-1947) have rarely been studied together. Pigeon-holing the two authors by class and place has oversimplified both: Wharton is categorized as an eastern aristocrat, Cather as a western populist. Yet they lived and worked in the same “space-time capsule” (Nancy Green); moreover, their works carry on complex conversations with each other. In their fiction, non-fiction, and other writings, they expressed nearly identical concerns about American culture, including its overemphasis on money-making and its consequent lack of appreciation for beauty. Emphasizing place in literature (derived from Bakhtin’s chronotope), the essay proposes the term intersectional intertextuality to identify literary works set in the same place which speak to each other profoundly, as Wharton’s and Cather’s do in New York City, the West, and France. Further, it argues for new studies between authors who may seem unlikely matches, but whose work coincides in place and focus.
Abstract for an article forthcoming in the Edith Wharton Review entitled “Wharton, Writing, and Nature.”
Although past critics of Wharton’s work have focused on the social world she
depicts, Wharton also presents the natural world in her work, from poems she
wrote as a teenager through her late writings. Using Thomas Lyon’s “Taxonomy of
Nature Writing” (1989), this article looks at a range of Wharton’s work to argue
that she is indeed a “nature writer.” Wharton’s work in Italian Villas and Their
Gardens and A Motor-Flight Through France meditate on the relationship
between landscape and human habitation, and her lifelong experiences of gar-
dening in various climates deepened her ecological understanding of climatologi-
cal differences. Wharton’s first published story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” argues for
the importance of nature even in an urban setting, while also creating a charac-
ter who is a phenologist (someone who studies seasonal cycles); much later
in her career, her paired novels Hudson River Bracketed and The Gods Arrive
not only demonstrate Wharton’s own skill as a nature writer, but also convey the
importance of nature, both cosmic and local, as inspiration to the writer. Finally,
the article suggests that Wharton’s attentiveness to nature may have made her a
better writer; moreover, it asks readers to consider Wharton’s depictions of nature
as they consider today’s ecological crisis.
Von Rosk, Nancy. “A Writerly Communion: Browning, Balzac, and Catholicism in Edith Wharton’s “The Duchess at Prayer.” Re-Reading the Age of Innovation: Victorians, Moderns and Literary Newness, 1830-1950, edited by Louise Kane, New York: Routledge, 2022. 158-171.
Edith Wharton’s “The Duchess at Prayer,” a gothic tale of murder and forbidden love reveals the influences of two Victorian authors Wharton especially revered: Robert Browning and Honoré de Balzac. In her feminist re-imagining of Browning’s “My Last Duchess” and Balzac’s “Le Grande Bretêche,” Wharton infuses “Duchess” with Catholic imagery and references that not only contribute to the story’s gothic atmosphere, but are also key components in Wharton’s plot, for Catholicism is explicitly aligned with the patriarchal power that destroys the duchess and her lover. Although Wharton relies on gothic conventions and establishes Catholicism as the villain, the varied meanings Catholicism holds in this work are more complicated and unstable; indeed, Wharton’s story also reveals the aesthetic beauty and sensuality of Catholicism at the same time it critiques its ruthless unfettered power. By situating Wharton’s early gothic tale within the shifting anti-Catholicism of nineteenth-century culture, this essay examines not only how the story reveals Wharton’s reverence for as well as her rejection of the Victorians, but also the spiritual tensions within Wharton’s own life as the Victorian Age moves into the Modern period.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Preface
Dale M. Bauer
Foreword
Nicholas Hudson, Anne Schuyler, and Susan Wissler
1 Introduction: Broadening the Horizon of Edith Wharton Studies
Emily J. Orlando
Part One Edith Wharton and Identity
2 Single, White, Female: Miscegenation, Incest, and Reproduction in Edith
Wharton’s Twilight Sleep
Meredith L. Goldsmith
3 Queer Wharton: The Exultations and Agonies of Kate Clephane’s Closet Shannon Brennan
4 Picturing Edith Wharton’s Modern Woman: Gender and the Social
Construction of Age
Melanie V. Dawson
5 Paralysis and Euthanasia in Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree, The Shadow of a
Doubt, and Ethan Frome
Maria-Novella Mercuri
Part Two Edith Wharton Beyond the Novel
6 “Social Order and Individual Appetites”: Edith Wharton’s Short Stories, 1891-1904
Paul J. Ohler
7 Edith Wharton in Verse
Emily Setina
8 Edith Wharton and Film
Donna M. Campbell
Part Three Influences and Intertextualities
9 “The Chill Joy of Renunciation”: Feminine Sacrifice in Edith Wharton
and Christina Rossetti
Margaret Jay Jessee
10 Edith Wharton and Willa Cather: Beyond “Surface Differences”
Julie Olin-Ammentorp
11 Consciousness in Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Reef
and The Golden Bowl
Jill Kress Karn
Part Four Global and Cultural Contexts
12 Edith Wharton and the Narratives of Travel and Tourism
Gary Totten
13 Seeking a Home for the Wretched Exotics: Edith Wharton’s
Heterotopic Views of Greece
Myrto Drizou
14 “Totally Vanished…Like a Pinch of Dust”: Edith Wharton and
the Trope of Cultural Extinction
Nir Evron
15 Edith Wharton and Pleasure
Virginia Ricard
16 The Mermaid as Capitalist: Networking and Upward Mobility in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country
Francesca Sawaya
Part Five Edith Wharton’s Library
17 Reading the Reader: Edith Wharton’s Library, Digital Methods,
and the Uses of Data
Sheila Liming
18 The Complete Works of Edith Wharton: Preparing the First
Authoritative Edition
Carol J. Singley, Donna M. Campbell and Frederick Wegener
Afterword: Edith Wharton in the Twenty-First Century
Elaine Showalter
Bibliography
Index
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/bloomsbury-handbook-to-edith-wharton-9781350182943/
I was on two podcasts discussing my work on Wharton’s Morocco and did a blog post for a new website designed as a clearinghouse for information on US-Morocco relations:
Edith Wharton: In Morocco
Ep. 39
•
Tuesday, January 3, 2023
Edith Wharton ranks as one of the Gilded Age’s most prolific and popular writers. In this episode, Professor Stacy Holden tells us about her research on Wharton’s lesser known travelogue In Morocco, a revealing account of the author’s travels to the French and Spanish colony. It tells us a great deal about American and European imperialism, and the Orientalism that pervaded her thinking.
https://shows.acast.com/gildedageandprogressiveera/episodes/edith-wharton-in-morocco
Moroccan/American, Edith Wharton Goes to Morocco with Stacy Holden (20 January 2023), https://rss.com/podcasts/moroccanamericanpod/788790/
“Edith Wharton in Morocco,” blog post for “Moroccan American Studies Initiative,” nd (January 2023), https://www.moroccanamericanstudies.com/stacy-holden-1
Edith Wharton was one of the most famous American writers of the early twentieth century. Her portrait of high society New York captured both the glamor and conformity of the Gilded Age. While her masterpiece novels Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence made her famous, she also wrote a popular travelogue describing her trip to Morocco in the early days of the French Protectorate. More than just a travelogue, In Morocco highlights a pivotal moment in world history and how American artistic and literary connections to Morocco have shaped political perceptions about the place.
The Edith Wharton Society 