Margarida Cadima

Pastoral Cosmopolitanism in Edith Wharton's Fiction (eBook, ePUB)

The World is a Welter

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

American novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937) is best known today for her tales of the city and the experiences of patrician New Yorkers in the "Gilded Age." This book pushes against the grain of critical orthodoxy by prioritizing other "species of spaces" in Wharton's work. For example, how do Wharton's narratives represent the organic profusion of external nature? Does the current scholarly fascination with the environmental humanities reveal previously unexamined or overlooked facets of Wharton's craft? I propose that what is most striking about her narrative practice is how she utilizes, adapts, and translates pastoral tropes, conventions, and concerns to twentieth-century American actualities. It is no accident that Wharton portrays characters returning to, or exploring, various natural localities, such as private gardens, public parks, chic mountain resorts, monumental ruins, or country-estate "follies." Such encounters and adventures prompt us to imagine new relationships with various geographies and the lifeforms that can be found there. The book addresses a knowledge gap in Wharton and the environmental humanities, especially recent debates in ecocriticism. The excavation of Wharton's words and the background of her narratives with an eye to offering an ecocritical reading of her work is what the book focuses on.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Anthem Press
• Seitenzahl: 230
• Erscheinungstermin: 11. Juli 2023
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781839988448
• Artikelnr.: 68318071

Autorenporträt

Margarida Cadima is an ecocriticism scholar and an adjunct professor in the English Writing, Literature, and Publishing department at The American University of Rome. She earned her PhD in English Literature at the University of Glasgow in 2021.

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I. GARDENS, Chapter 1. The Pastoral Cosmopolitanism of the (Not So) Secret Garden
Chapter 2. American Back Grounds
Chapter 3. Garden "Haunts"
Chapter 4. Central Park as an "Ecological Threshold"?
Chapter 5. French Gardens and Their Meaning
PART II. MOUNTAINS, Chapter 6. "Endless Plays of Mountain Forms": Mapping the Mountains
Chapter 7. Edith Wharton's European Mountains of Leisure
Chapter 8. Rural Americana and the "New World" Mountains
PART III. RUIN/ATION Chapter 9. Romantic Ruins? Edith Wharton's Sedimented Vision
Chapter 10. "Old" Ruins as a Melancholic Object and a Critique of Empire
Chapter 11. Stony Waste-The "New Ruin" in the Modern Metropolis and Garden Ruins
Conclusion
Appendix 1: Spring in a French Riviera Garden
Appendix 2: December in a French Rivera Garden
Bibliography
Index