An insightful look at representations of women’s bodies and female authority.
This work explores Edith Wharton's career-long concern with a 19th-century visual culture that limited female ...artistic agency and expression. Wharton repeatedly invoked the visual arts--especially painting—as a medium for revealing the ways that women's bodies have been represented (as passive, sexualized, infantalized, sickly, dead). Well-versed in the Italian masters, Wharton made special use of the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly its penchant for producing not portraits of individual women but instead icons onto whose bodies male desire is superimposed.
Emily Orlando contends that while Wharton's early work presents women enshrined by men through art, the middle and later fiction shifts the seat of power to women. From Lily Bart in The House of Mirth to Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country and Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence, women evolve from victims to vital agents, securing for themselves a more empowering and satisfying relationship to art and to their own identities.
Orlando also studies the lesser-known short stories and novels, revealing Wharton’s re-workings of texts by Browning, Poe, Balzac, George Eliot, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and, most significantly, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts is the first extended study to examine the presence in Wharton's fiction of the Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting of Rossetti and his muses, notably Elizabeth Siddall and Jane Morris. Wharton emerges as one of American literature's most gifted inter-textual realists, providing a vivid lens through which to view issues of power, resistance, and social change as they surface in American literature and culture.
Emily J. Orlando is Assistant Professor of American Literature at Tennessee State University.
No cabe duda de que el asunto de esta última obra es especialmente atractivo, dada la importancia intrínseca y la actualidad que todo lo referente a la mujer ha adquirido en las últimas décadas y, si ...se atiende a lo que el Profesor Díaz nos dice, a lo largo de todo el siglo XX. Age of extremes: the history of the world, 1914-1991, Nueva York, Pantheon Books; y Age of extremes: the short twentieth century, 1914-1991, Londres/Nueva York, Michael Joseph/Viking Penguin, cuya primera traducción al castellano la editó Crítica en Barcelona en 1995. Para entenderlo, el autor dedica mucho espacio a la historia general (política, económica, social, cultural) y tampoco desprecia la aportación de los varones a esa historia. De crucero en crucero, de Hotel Palace en Hotel Palace, de Argel a Venecia y de allí a Cortina, esta tropa ha jurado, bajo el liderazgo de Judith, la hija mayor, encontrar «un hogar cálido y estable» y permanecer unida pese a los ocasionales caprichos de sus distintos padres (dos ociosos millonarios, un príncipe italiano, una estrella de cine) de separarlos.
Edith Wharton (1862– 1937), who lived nearly half of her life during the cinema age when she published many of her well-known works, acknowledged that she disliked the movies, characterizing ...them as an enemy of the imagination. Yet her fiction often referenced film and popular Hollywood culture, and she even sold the rights to several of her novels to Hollywood studios.
Edith Wharton on Film explores these seeming contradictions and examines the relationships among Wharton’ s writings, the popular culture in which she published them, and the subsequent film adaptations of her work (three from the 1930s and four from the 1990s). Author Parley Ann Boswell examines the texts in which Wharton referenced film and Hollywood culture and evaluates the extant films adapted from Wharton’ s fiction.
The volume introduces Wharton’ s use of cinema culture in her fiction through the 1917 novella Summer , written during the nation’ s first wave of feminism, in which the heroine Charity Royall is moviegoer and new American woman, consumer and consumable. Boswell considers the source of this conformity and entrapment, especially for women. She discloses how Wharton struggled to write popular stories and then how she revealed her antipathy toward popular movie culture in two late novels.
Boswell describes Wharton’ s financial dependence on the American movie industry, which fueled her antagonism toward Hollywood culture, her well-documented disdain for popular culture, and her struggles to publish in women’ s magazines.
This first full-length study that examines the film adaptations of Wharton’ s fiction covers seven films adapted from Wharton’ s works between 1930 and 2000 and the fifty-year gap in Wharton film adaptations. The study also analyzes Sophy Viner in The Reef as pre-Hollywood ingé nue, characters in Twilight Sleep and The Children and the real Hollywood figures who might have inspired them, and The Sheik and racial stereotypes.
Boswell traces the complicated relationship of fiction and narrative film, the adaptations and cinematic metaphors of Wharton’ s work in the 1990s, and Wharton’ s persona as an outsider. Wharton’ s fiction on film corresponds in striking ways to American noir cinema, says Boswell, because contemporary filmmakers recognize and celebrate the subversive qualities of Wharton’ s work.
Edith Wharton on Film, which includes eleven illustrations, enhances Wharton’ s stature as a major American author and provides persuasive evidence that her fiction should be read as American noir literature.
Edith Wharton feared that the 'ill-bred', foreign and poor would overwhelm what was known as the American native elite. Drawing on a range of turn-of-the-century social documents, unpublished ...archival material and Wharton's major novels, Jennie Kassanoff argues that a fuller appreciation of American culture and democracy becomes available through a sustained engagement with these controversial views. She pursues her theme through Wharton's spirited participation in a variety of turn-of-the-century discourses - from euthanasia and tourism to pragmatism and Native Americans - to produce a truly interdisciplinary study of this major American writer. Kassanoff locates Wharton squarely in the middle of the debates on race, class and democratic pluralism at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on diverse cultural materials, she offers close interdisciplinary readings that will be of interest to scholars of American literature and culture.
...Evron argues that while the 19th-century novel of cultural extinction focused on “outlying, nonurban communities,” the century following transposes “the cultural extinction trope from periphery to ...center” (21). Evron reads The Age of Innocence as “a meditation on the transience of a cultural world, on the triumph of time over the desire for fixity, on the hopelessness of that desire” (80). ...Wharton’s presentation of Newland Archer involves not identification with Newland Archer the man, “but rather with the predicament in which he finds himself at the end of the novel: that of outliving the world that had shaped him” (88–89). ...when the short-sighted Doctor Max Demant rashly challenges a fellow officer to a duel which he knows will mean death for him, he is so much a prisoner of the network of cultural rules and requirements imposed by his world that he is unable just to flee, for flight would mean “the death of his identity” (148). ...although Evron insists on their transience and continual change, he also on occasions has a tendency to treat them as monolithic and sealed to the world outside of them. People are formed by cultures, key aspects of which are internalized and used to build up a specific personality and identity, but people are able to expel aspects of their cultural nurturing from their makeup, and they also on occasions escape from the cultures in and by which they have been formed: witness the brush-makers in Roth’s Habsburg empire and Wharton’s Ellen Olenska. ...is not Evron’s book itself an example of looking down on blossoms other than his own?
In August 1937 a small group of Edith Wharton's intimate friends gathered to pay their last respects at her funeral in France. Among that small group of people was her friend for many years, Lawrence ...'Johnnie' Johnston, the creator of two famous gardens, at Hidcote Manor, Gloucestershire, in England and Serre de la Madone, Menton, on the Cote d'Azur in the south of France. Wharton and Johnston shared not only a love of nature and gardens but also a shared experience of life. Both were private people who had had very similar childhoods, experiencing the loss of their fathers at an early age. Yet there was one aspect of their lives in which they were very different. Wharton, the writer, chose to expose her innermost thoughts and feelings and was continually in the public eye. Johnston, however, wrote nothing about his gardens, hardly permitted photographs of himself or his gardens and, though he kept an engagement diary, these, with two exceptions, have not survived. As a result Johnston remains a shadowy figure upon whom light occasionally falls from within the diaries kept by Edith Wharton. Her diaries also provide an illuminating insight into both her gardens at St-Brice, and at Hyeres, in the south of France. Wharton was a passionate gardener - an aspect not yet fully explored in previous biographies - early in her life after she had made her first garden at The Mount, at Lenox, Massachusetts in the United States, she claimed she was a better landscape designer than novelist. As fellow gardeners, Edith and Johnnie spent many hours together visiting each other's gardens, staying as house guests, plant-collecting in the Haute Massif and travelling by car to nurseries and gardens throughout England and France.In this major new critical biography Alan Ruff has brought the two together, calling upon his lifetime's knowledge of landscape and garden design to assess the influences and techniques employed in the gardens of these two remarkable people, all set against a long-vanished, high-society background.
Edith Wharton and Willa Cather wrote many of the most enduring American novels from the first half of the twentieth century, including Wharton'sThe House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and The Age of ...Innocence
, and Cather's O Pioneers!
, My Ántonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. Yet despite their perennial popularity and their status as major American novelists, Wharton (1862-1937) and Cather (1873-1947) have rarely been studied together. Indeed, critics and scholars seem to have conspired to keep them at a distance: Wharton is seen as "our literary aristocrat," an author who chronicles the lives of the East Coast, Europe-bound elite, while Cather is considered a prairie populist who describes the lives of rugged western pioneers. These depictions, though partially valid, nonetheless rely on oversimplifications and neglect the striking and important ways the works of these two authors intersect. The first comparative study of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather in thirty years, this book combines biographical, historical, and literary analyses with a focus on place and aesthetics to reveal Wharton's and Cather's parallel experiences of dislocation, their relationship to each other as writers, and the profound similarities in their theories of fiction. Julie Olin-Ammentorp provides a new assessment of the affinities between Wharton and Cather by exploring the importance of literary and geographic place in their lives and works, including the role of New York City, the American West, France, and travel. In doing so she reveals the two authors' shared concern about the culture of place and the place of culture in the United States.
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.
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