Introduction

Abstract

In her tribute to French novelist and critic Paul Bourget (1852–1935), Edith Wharton (1862–1937) praises her late friend’s objectivity and openness of mind and relates his intellectual independence and cultural astuteness on issues calling for political insight and personal sensitivity to his vast erudition about other countries and their people. Bourget’s internationalism impelled Wharton to formulate the general statement in the epigraph, published in La Revue Hebdomadaire on June 21, 1936 asserting that a true comprehension of one’s own country entails a transcultural perspective, which one is able to acquire by living in other countries and developing an affinity with their people, customs, and literatures. Such an experience inculcates in one an impartial critical perspicacity with which one can determine the level of progress and degree of refinement of one’s country in the universal social and cultural spectrum. Having traveled extensively mostly in Europe from a young age and lived in France nearly all her adult life, in 1936, Wharton knew the truthfulness of her assertion. It was her novel The Age of Innocence (1920) that fetched the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. Certainly, the critical skill with which this writer discerned and displayed the vices and virtues of Old New York in her fiction was honed by her expatriate life and it rendered her work superlative in presenting the wholesome atmosphere of American life and manners.

It is only in seeing other countries, in studying their customs, reading their books, associating with their inhabitants, that one can situate one’s own country in the history of civilization.

Edith Wharton, “Memories of Bourget Overseas”