Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism

JENNIFER HAYTOCK is Associate Professor of English at SUNY College at Brockport, USA.

• Troubling the Subjective: The Problem of Impressionism in The Reef 'Any Change May Mean Something:' Summer, Sexuality, and Single Women 'Unmediated Bonding Between Men:' The Accumulation of Men in the Short Stories 'A Sign of Pain's Triumph:' War, Art, and Civilization 'The Readjustment of Personal Relations:'  Marriage, Modernism, and the Alienated Self Antimodernism and Looking Pretty: Wharton's Artistic Practice

" Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism is a fresh approach to the question of Wharton s place in the modernist canon. Although Wharton chose not to identify herself as a modernist, Haytock demonstrates, through a series of enlightening readings, the many ways in which her works address the contemporary cultural issues that the modernists had made their own, from the fragmented, impressionistic writing style she employs in The Reef through the anxieties over masculinity in A Son at the Front and the alienation, isolation, and failure of communication that define the modernist moment in Twilight Sleep. Drawing on unpublished letters as well as recent scholarship expanding the definitions of modernism, Haytock provides a convincing and illuminating argument for considering Wharton as part of the larger conversations of literary modernism." - Donna Campbell, Associate Professor of English, Washington State University