Edith Wharton's Social Register Fictions and Contexts [Hardcover]

Edith Wharton's wide reading in the nascent disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and evolutionary theory of her day plays a role in her social fictions. She understands her world in binary terms of belonging and exile, of spatial boundaries and exclusions, and tribal behaviour. She applied that intellectual framework to the struggle to preserve the Old World from the territorial and cultural threat of the Great War. In linked thematic sections, Claire Preston considers ideas of tribal inclusion and banishment, buccaneer figures whose money-energy overcomes tribal demarcations, and expatriatism, the self-imposed mode of exile which fed Wharton's apparently chilly empiricism and was the origin of some of her most important work. She suggests that, against the claims of realism, Wharton should in fact be included in the early Modernist canon.List of Abbreviations List of Illustrations Preface with Acknowledgements PART ONE: TRIBES The Force of Negation The Deaf and Dumb Asylum Boundaries and Bounders Men at Work Image of Snow: Whartonian Womanhood Libraries and Studies: Where Real Things Happen to Men PART TWO: OUTCASTS Wharton's Social Darwinism Maps of Exclusion Rituals of Casting Out Reconditioned Malefactors PART THREE: BUCCANEERS Product Placement Buccaneers Exploit and Industry: the Elmer Epic The Steep of Disenchantment 'Beyond' Epic Effrontery The Bareness of a Small Half-lit Place The Firebird and the Watersprite PART FOUR: EXPATRIATES The Lesson of the Master: James and Wharton outre-mer Home Thoughts from Abroad: America and Americanity Plunder: Buccaneers go to Europe When They Die 'Did You Ever See Anything So French?': Assimilators Children of Flanders: How the War Made Europe a Real Place Bibliography Index

'Claire Preston's appropriately elegant Edith Wharton's Social Register studies the modes by which Wharton registers her perennial interest in the politics of inclusion and exclusion...Preston's alert, appreciative readings maintain WhartonlcR