Memorial boxes and guarded interiors : Edith Wharton and material culture / edited by Gary Totten.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Totten, Gary.

Series:

Studies in American literary realism and naturalism

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937--Criticism and interpretation.

Wharton, Edith.

Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937.

Material culture in literature.

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

x, 315 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press, [2007]

Summary:

In Edith Wharton?s works, references to architecture, interior decoration, painting, sculpture, and fashion abound. As these essays demonstrate, art and objects are for Wharton evidence of cultural belief and reflect the values, assumptions, and customs of the burgeoning consumer culture in which she lived and about which she wrote. Furthermore, her meditations about issues of architecture, design, and decoration serve as important commentaries on her vision of the literary arts. -- In The Decoration of Houses she notes that furniture and bric-à-brac are often crowded into a room in order to compensate for a "lack of architectural composition in the treatment of the walls," and that unless an ornamental object "adequately expresses an artistic conception" it is better removed from the room. These aesthetic standards apply equally to her construction of narratives and are evidence of a sensibility that counters typical understandings of Wharton as a novelist of manners and place her instead as an important figure in the development of American literary modernism. -- Essays in this collection address issues such as parallels between her characters and the houses they occupy; dress as a metaphor for the flux of critical fashion; the marketing of Wharton's work to a growing female readership ; her relationship to mass culture industries such as advertising, theater, and cinema; the tableaux vivant both as set piece and as fictional strategy; the representation of female bodies as objets d?art; and her characters? attempts at self-definition through the acquisition and consumption of material goods. All of Wharton?s major novels-- The House of Mirth, The Fruit of the Tree, Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, Summer, The Age of Innocence, and Twilight Sleep --as well as her short stories, criticism, and essays are explored. -- Gary Totten is Assistant Professor of English at North Dakota State University. His essays on Wharton and her contemporaries have appeared in American Indian Quarterly, American Literary Realism, College Literature, Dreiser Studies, and MELUS .

Contents:

Introduction : Edith Wharton and material culture / Gary Totten

Presence and professionalism : the critical reception of Edith Wharton / Lyn Bennett

No innocence in this age : Edith Wharton's commercialization and commodification / Jamie Barlowe

Materializing the word : the woman writer and the struggle for authority in "Mr. Jones" / Jacqueline Wilson-Jordan

Picturing Lily : body art in The house of mirth / Emily J. Orlando

Building the female body : modern technology and techniques at work in Twilight sleep / Deborah J. Zak

Fashioning an aesthetics of consumption in The house of mirth / Jennifer Shepherd

The futile and the dingy : wasting and being wasted in The house of mirth / J. Michael Duvall

The bachelor girl and the body politic : the built environment, self-possession, and the never-married woman in The house of mirth / Linda S. Watts

"Use unknown" : Edith Wharton, the museum space, and the writer's work / Karin Roffman

The machine in the home : women and technology in The fruit of the tree / Gary Totten

Undine Spragg, the mirror and the lamp in The custom of the country / Carol Baker Sapora.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [287]-301) and index.

ISBN:

9780817315610

0817315616

9780817354190

0817354190

OCLC:

71812702