{"title":"\"Every One Knew\": Epistemologies of the City in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence","authors":"Katrin Horn","doi":"10.5325/editwharrevi.36.2.0148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/editwharrevi.36.2.0148","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:New York looms large in much of Edith Wharton's work, maybe never more so than in The Age of Innocence. The city is not just the space in which the stories unfold or the social context which frames the central drama. Rather, \"New York\" serves as the central source of knowledge for characters and readers alike. Whether in the form of private gossip or society journals, news travels fast, judgement is swift, and knowledge about everyone's intimate affairs is ever present. The Age of Innocence is hence marked by the stark distinction between the reticence of its main characters—who live in an \"atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies,\" share \"mute message[s],\" and rely on \"silence to communicate all [they] had to say\"—and the eloquence of the city. By detailing this contrast between the novel's main characters and its setting, this article addresses gossip and other forms of communal, networked, or anonymous knowledge not only as an element of plot, but as narrative strategy in The Age of Innocence. It thus combines an exploration of Edith Wharton's distinct style with an analysis of New York's central role in her writing.","PeriodicalId":40904,"journal":{"name":"Edith Wharton Review","volume":"1 1","pages":"148 - 164"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82945970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Nay, rather, Lord, between”","authors":"E. Aylor","doi":"10.5325/editwharrevi.37.1.0060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/editwharrevi.37.1.0060","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Edith Wharton composed many dramatic monologues in her lifetime, and from the beginning of her poetic output, her personae tend to speak from a point of extremity between the living and the dead—often choosing, in fact, to narrate the moments of their own deaths. From her 1878 book of juvenilia, in a poem called “The Last Token,” Wharton made her interest in this particular placement evident; she herself, as evidenced by her reading and letters, was often strung between religious and secular modes of life, value, and belief. This article examines two of Wharton's “deathbed monologues” in detail: “The Leper's Funeral and Death,” unpublished in Wharton's lifetime, and—primarily—“Margaret of Cortona,” published in 1901. In each, a person speaks not only at the cusp of their bodily death but also from a vantage point past a symbolic death. In dividing and extending these speakers' deaths in this way, Wharton draws attention to the simultaneous fragility and persistence of the human: between and beyond traditional Christian divisions of body and soul.","PeriodicalId":40904,"journal":{"name":"Edith Wharton Review","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80391146","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"American Snobs: Transatlantic Novelists, Liberal Culture and the Genteel Tradition","authors":"W. Blazek","doi":"10.5325/editwharrevi.37.1.0101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/editwharrevi.37.1.0101","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40904,"journal":{"name":"Edith Wharton Review","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80796009","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Edith Wharton and the Architect","authors":"Emily J. Orlando","doi":"10.5325/editwharrevi.37.1.0044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/editwharrevi.37.1.0044","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 To date, the only scholarly attention paid to the two abandoned Wharton novels called “The Keys of Heaven” has focused on the “Praslin version,” a retelling of a murder-suicide from 1840s Paris. The “Olney-Beecher version” concerns a woman named Catherine Beecher, her would-be lover Jacob Olney, and her husband, a New England architect who sounds a lot like Ogden Codman Jr., with whom Wharton wrote The Decoration of Houses. This overlooked material evidently from the mid-1920s should be of interest to scholars for the potential light it sheds on her writing from the period and on the status of her rift with Codman. The evidence suggests that Wharton's fictional narratives moved from a place where she was writing in “one long shriek” to a space where she could imagine a lover turning the handle of that inner door and crossing the threshold into a room full of treasures awaiting discovery.","PeriodicalId":40904,"journal":{"name":"Edith Wharton Review","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79522352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age by Melanie V. Dawson (review)","authors":"Avril Horner","doi":"10.5325/editwharrevi.37.1.0091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/editwharrevi.37.1.0091","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40904,"journal":{"name":"Edith Wharton Review","volume":"3 1","pages":"91 - 95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74268797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Improvised Chase”","authors":"Megan A. Carney","doi":"10.5325/editwharrevi.37.1.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/editwharrevi.37.1.0001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":40904,"journal":{"name":"Edith Wharton Review","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88508645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}