Abstract
Edith Wharton is perhaps America’s most accomplished female novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, and she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1927. Yet much of what she wrote during the 1920s and the 1930s languishes in relative obscurity. Academics and critics fell under the sway of modernism during these decades and well into the mid-twentieth century. From the perspective of her detractors (among them Vernon Parrington and T. S. Eliot in the 1920s, along with Lionel Trilling and F. R. Leavis in the 1950s), Wharton’s observations on American life became less relevant after the First World War. In their view, she was little more than the quaint relic of a bygone era. They saw Wharton’s permanent relocation to France in 1910 as the root cause of a growing inability to speak persuasively about American ways and their meaning.
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© 2013 Ferdâ Asya
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Glennon, J. (2013). Toward a Brighter Vision of “American Ways and Their Meaning”: Edith Wharton and the Americanization of Europe After the First World War. In: Asya, F. (eds) American Writers in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137340023_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137340023_6
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