Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Series Number 92) - Softcover

Singley, Carol J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 052164612X ISBN 13: 9780521646123

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Edith Wharton emerges in this book as a novelist of morals (rather than manners). Behind her polished portraits of upper-class New York life is a thoughtful, questioning spirit. This book analyzes Wharton's religion and philosophy in short stories and seven major novels. It considers Wharton in terms of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American intellectual and religious life. It also analyzes Wharton in terms of her gender and class, explaining how this aristocratic woman applies and yet transforms both the classical and Christian traditions that she inherits.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit considers Wharton as a novelist of morals rather than manners, a novelist who in the exercise of writing sought answers to profound spiritual and metaphysical questions. Carol Singley analyzes the short stories and seven novels in light of Wharton's religious and philosophical development and her attitudes toward Anglicanism, Calvinism, Transcendentalism, and Catholicism. Singley situates Wharton in the context of turn-of-the-century science, historicism, and aestheticism, reading her religious and philosophical outlook as an evolving response to the cultural crisis of belief. She further invokes the dynamics of class and gender as central to Wharton's quest, describing the ways in which the author accepted and yet transformed both the classical and Christian traditions that she inherited.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 052164612X
• ISBN 13: 9780521646123
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 284