Edith Wharton

Laura Rattray

During her lifetime, Edith Wharton was America’s most popular and prolific writer. The social chronicler of her age, her international reputation was secured by triumphs such as The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country and The Age of Innocence, a work for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. More recently, an explosion of scholarly research and a spate of Hollywood adaptations of her books have assured her place in the American novelistic tradition and the popular imagination. At her death in 1937, Wharton left behind a fascinating collection of unpublished work written throughout her lifetime. This is the first scholarly edition of this body of work. Largely unfinished, these unknown works include a dazzling novella penned when Wharton was only fourteen, two abandoned novels, three stage-plays, and frank life writings drafted late in her career. Several texts are works-in-progress for later, more renowned writings. The plays in particular open up a hitherto unexplored field of Wharton studies and allow scholars to adjust their assessment of her as a novelist. Copy texts are carefully chosen. Where more than one draft exists, the most advanced version will be printed and textual variants are recorded in the endnotes. The edition also benefits from a lengthy generally introduction, background essays to each genre section, headnotes and endnotes. The edition will be essential for scholars and students of Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature, American Literature, Women’s Writing and the History of the Novel.

The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton was one of America's most popular and prolific writers, becoming the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921. In a publishing career spanning seven decades, Wharton lived and wrote through a period of tremendous social, cultural and historical change. Bringing together a team of international scholars, this volume provides the first substantial text dedicated to the various contexts that frame Wharton's remarkable career. Each essay offers a clearly argued and lucid assessment of Wharton's work as it relates to seven key areas: life and works, critical receptions, book and publishing history, arts and aesthetics, social designs, time and place, and literary milieux. These sections provide a broad and accessible resource for students coming to Wharton for the first time while offering scholars new critical insights.

Edith Wharton in Context

William Blazek

F. Scott Fitzgerald's final completed novel, Tender is the Night, published in 1934 but written during the previous decade, is a quintessentially decadent story of Americans abroad in the Jazz Age. In this accessible collection of essays, an impressive congregation of North American and European scholars presents eleven new readings of this widely studied book. The list of noteworthy contributors, including the general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the editors of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, makes this volume required reading for Fitzgerald scholars and fans.

Twenty-first-century Readings of Tender is the Night

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.

Beyond Fiction

Edith Wharton and Genre

Bringing together established Fitzgerald scholars from the United Kingdom, Europe and North America, this collection offers 11 new readings of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1934 novel, 'Tender is the Night'. The book will be published to coincide with the biennial F. Scott Fitzgerald conference in July 2007.

Twenty-First-Century Readings of 'Tender is the Night'

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.

A Reassessment

Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country

Jennifer Haytock

Uncovers new evidence and presents new ideas that invite us to reconsider our understanding Edith Wharton's life and career.

The New Edith Wharton Studies

This collection of essays examines the various social, cultural and historical contexts surrounding Edith Wharton's popular and prolific literary career.

Bringing together established Fitzgerald scholars from the United Kingdom, Europe and North America, this collection offers eleven new readings of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1934 novel, Tender is the Night. While The Great Gatsby continues to attract more attention than the rest of Fitzgerald's oeuvre combined, persistent, if infrequent, writings on Tender is the Night from the 1950s onwards indicate that, like Gatsby's green light, Fitzgerald's fourth novel continues both to perplex and intrigue. In addition to the inevitable biographical interpretations, the novel has, in myriad readings, been viewed as: a marriage novel, a text of disturbed psychology, a text nostalgically marking the passing of a talent and a time, an outdated "Jazz Age" story, and "the great novel about American history". This new collection of essays opens criticism of Tender Is the Night to a new generation of scholars providing new ways for readers to appreciate this complex, compelling, and profound work.Contributors include edi

Laura Rattray

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