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  • Wharton and Cather
  • Carol J. Singley and Robert Thacker

Edith Wharton's major novels receive the most attention this year, with The Custom of the Country highlighted in a collection of essays, the first devoted to this novel. Neglected texts, especially those written after 1920, are also the focus of criticism. Comparative studies abound, with Wharton analyzed alongside writers ranging from Shakespeare to Willa Cather and other modernist writers to Anita Brookner and Candace Bushnell. The concern in much of this criticism is not whether Wharton is a realist or modernist but rather how she engages with the dynamics of change and how her immersion in modern culture shapes her outlook and that of her characters. Interdisciplinary approaches are rich and varied, including philosophical and ethical approaches to The House of Mirth and The Fruit of the Tree, the role of psychology and family systems in The House of Mirth, treatments of law, politics, and nursing in The Reef and Summer, and speech-act theory in The Age of Innocence.

The principal contributions to Cather scholarship this year are two collections of essays, one of them the latest volume of Cather Studies, Willa Cather: A Writer's Worlds, and the other devoted to The Song of the Lark. Together the volumes display the variety and wide extent of Cather's interests and activities—her influences, philosophical engagement, and artistic intentions. In a category all its own is At Willa Cather's Tables: The Cather Foundation Cookbook, edited by Ann Romines and produced by the Willa Cather Foundation. The book features Cather-associated recipes and is illustrated with images from Cather's family cookbooks, items connected with the family, and photographs of Cather [End Page 139] and family and friends at table. Cather valued both the conviviality and pleasures of sharing food, and At Willa Cather's Tables is an apt and handsome supplement to the more serious scholarship surrounding her work.

The Wharton section of the chapter is contributed by Carol J. Singley, the Cather section by Robert Thacker.

i Edith Wharton

a. Books

Laura Rattray's landmark volume of contributed original essays, Edith Wharton's "The Custom of the Country": A Reassessment (Pickering & Chatto), is the first full-length study of Wharton's 1913 "great American novel." Rattray's introduction (pp. 1-13) ably situates it in the context of Wharton's professional and personal life, including her rising reputation, tumultuous love affair, and divorce. The first group of essays focuses on contexts. Susan Goodman's "The Custom of the Country: Edith Wharton's Conversation with the Atlantic Monthly" (pp. 15-28) offers rich biographical material to argue that "the dynamic that Wharton established between the press and her characters . . . mirrors her own dialogue with the Atlantic" about shifting cultural values regarding women, marriage, parenting, race, nationhood, and money. The novel voices Wharton's doubt about "culture trickling down to the waiting masses" and prefigures the destructive forces that would lead to World War I. Shafquat Towheed's "When the Reading Had to Stop: Readers, Reading and the Circulation of Texts in The Custom of the Country" (pp. 29-41), in an astute analysis of reading practices, dubs Custom Wharton's "most anthropological text." Wharton reflects on the proliferation of print in the marketplace, offering not just a diatribe against popular culture but also a sophisticated, nuanced study of diversified reading practices and the social spaces they help to define. Bonnie Shannon McMullen's "'Don't Cry—It Ain't That Kind of a Story': Wharton's Business of Fiction, 1908-12" (pp. 43-58) intriguingly links the genesis of the novel to short fiction Wharton was also writing at the time. For example, "The Pretext" and "The Choice" describe women and moral dilemmas like the ones Wharton was facing; "The Verdict," "The Bolted Door," "The Daunt Diana," and "Full Circle" raise questions of artistic inspiration and integrity; the ghost stories "Afterward," "The Triumph of Night," and "The Eyes" address dimensions of experience beyond reason and control; "Autres Temps" [End Page 140] explores temporal perspectives employed in the novel form; and "Xingu" introduces playfulness and self-parody.

A second group of essays in Rattray's volume discusses Undine Spragg...

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