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  • Wharton and Cather
  • Carol J. Singley and Ann Moseley

Scholarship on Wharton and Cather is robust and engaging. Wharton studies include four books and some 20 articles or book chapters of uniformly high quality. Two book-length studies explore the roles of science, philosophy, and politics in Wharton’s fiction, responding to her impressive grasp of intellectual issues of her day. Critics continue to explore questions of Wharton’s naturalism, modernism, and anti-Semitism as well as her place in literary periods and movements. Several essays analyze her fiction in relation to that of contemporary writers, offering continuing evidence of Wharton’s growing canonical importance. This year’s Cather scholarship includes the Nebraska edition of One of Ours, a collection of essays, three other books, and more than 30 separate articles and book chapters. Cultural criticism, source studies, and genre studies—especially of modernism—remain significant approaches. One of Ours, The Professor’s House, and The Song of the Lark receive the most attention. There is a noticeable decline in essays on teaching Cather and on her short fiction, with the exception of “The Namesake.”

The Wharton section of this chapter is contributed by Carol J. Singley, the Cather section by Ann Moseley.

i Edith Wharton

a. Editions and Books

Janet Beer and Elizabeth Nolan assemble valuable contemporary views of Wharton in Edith Wharton, volume 3 of Lives of Victorian Literary Figures IV (Pickering & Chatto). Jane Spirit’s [End Page 117] comprehensive introduction to this segment of the series in volume 1 (pp. ix–xxviii) raises questions about Wharton and performance and complicates simplistic associations of Wharton’s writing with her sense of self. Comparing Wharton to Oscar Wilde and Henry James, the subjects of the other two volumes in the set, Spirit describes her as a writer challenged by increasing disconnections between personal and national identity, highly aware of her public role, and strategic in her adoption of personae. Beer and Nolan, in their selection of letters, reviews, essays, obituaries, and other documents, strive to present Wharton “in the round.” They reprint 15 of the 26 reminiscences provided to Percy Lubbock as he prepared the first Wharton biography in 1947, including those by childhood friends such as Daisy Chandler and friends important later in life such as Kenneth Clark and Theodore Roosevelt. These accounts are welcome correctives to Lubbock’s selective, often-biased accounts of Wharton. Other materials offer a range of literary assessments as well as commentaries on Wharton’s relief work during World War I. Retrieved from archives or reprinted from newspapers and magazines, these sources provide valuable perspectives on Wharton and her work.

Two full-length studies give serious attention to philosophical and scientific issues in Wharton’s fiction. Tricia M. Farwell, Love and Death in Edith Wharton’s Fiction (Peter Lang), analyzes Wharton’s engagement with philosophy and science by examining connections between love and death in her fiction. Farwell’s approach moves the study of romantic conflict away from its social aspects and toward its roots in Plato, Darwin, and Freud. She argues that Wharton portrays love as a struggle between the idealistic notion of soul mates finding each other (Plato) and the realistic view of natural selection (Darwin) as expressed in the Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud). In Farwell’s schema “The Fullness of Life” is essential to understanding Wharton’s developmental depiction of this struggle in her fiction. For example, in The House of Mirth and The Fruit of the Tree ideal spiritual love is found only in actual or figurative death; in Ethan Frome physical and spiritual love is imagined in one person, but these two kinds of loves cannot exist simultaneously; The Reef, a transitional novel, places a high value on physical love, which reaches full expression in Summer; and in later works such as The Glimpses of the Moon, Twilight Sleep, and The Buccaneers characters strive with varying success to achieve a balance of physical and spiritual love.

Paul J. Ohler’s Edith Wharton’s “Evolutionary Conception”: Darwinian Allegory in Her Major Novels (Routledge) is a vigorous analysis of [End Page 118] Wharton’s use of evolutionary theory. Linking science to sociology, politics, and aesthetics, Ohler addresses naturalist as...

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