Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism

Exploring Edith Wharton’s engagement with global issues in her life and writing

Hailed for her remarkable social and psychological insights into the Gilded Age lives of privileged Americans, Edith Wharton, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, was a transnational author who attempted to understand and appreciate the culture, history, and artifacts of the regions she encountered in her extensive travels abroad. Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism explores the international scope of Wharton’s life and writing, focusing on how her work connects with the idea of cosmopolitanism.

This volume illustrates the many ways Wharton engaged with global issues of her time. Contributors examine both her canonical and lesser-known works, including her art historical discoveries, political work, travel writing, World War I texts, and first novel. They consider themes of anarchism, race, imperialism, regionalism, and orientalism; Wharton’s treatment of contemporary marriage debates; her indebtedness to her literary predecessors; and her genre experimentation. Together, they demonstrate how Wharton’s struggle to balance her powerful local and national identifications with cosmopolitan values, resulted in a diverse, complex, and sometimes problematic relationship to a cosmopolitan vision.

Meredith L. Goldsmith, professor of English at Ursinus College, is coeditor of Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s and American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity.

Emily J. Orlando, professor of English and the E. Gerald Corrigan Endowed Chair at Fairfield University, is the author of Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts and editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton and the annotated edition of Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman’s The Decoration of Houses.