In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism ed. by Meredith L. Goldsmith and Emily J. Orlando
  • Sheila Liming
Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism. Ed. Meredith L. Goldsmith and Emily J. Orlando. Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2016. 304 pp. Cloth, $79.95

The word cosmopolitanism defies easy explanation. This is in spite of the fact that, as a concept, cosmopolitanism helps to explain much of the social, cultural, and material preoccupations that appear on display in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature. As editors Meredith L. Goldsmith and Emily J. Orlando point out in the introduction to their new volume Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism, this [End Page 294] period was "marked by revolutions in technologies of communication and travel," which resulted in a heightened interest in tourism but also in what Goldsmith and Orlando label "a benign appreciation of difference" among American elites. To know and experience difference during this era was, moreover, to be modern since "cosmopolitanism suggests a kind of enlightened statelessness" and an "existential state of non-belonging" that made nationalistic attachment look like a quaint and outmoded vestige of nineteenth-century thinking. As such, it stands to reason that themes of difference and variability should take center stage in this collection of essays, which positions Edith Wharton's writing as an "ideal site through which to contemplate the power and limitations" of cosmopolitanism.

Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism grew out of the Edith Wharton Society's quadrennial conference that took place in Italy in 2012. And while the term cosmopolitanism can't help but be ambiguous and multivariate, what distinguishes this volume of essays is a feeling of close-knit camaraderie and discursive belonging. The various pieces of it—which cover a range of topics but fall under three headings ("Ideals," "Places," and "Aesthetics")—speak to and with one another, revealing the contours of a community of scholars who care deeply about Wharton and thus would have the critical conversation about her extended to include "questions of race and nation, which Wharton scholarship has only recently begun to explore." Collectively, the essays establish the importance of seeing Wharton's writing through cosmopolitanism and through the linked frameworks of race and nation since, as Gary Totten points out in his afterword, Wharton's own "willingness to participate in the global interchange of ideas and influences" is nevertheless apparent in her writing. Totten argues that Wharton is not, like the mildly conservative newland Archer in her novel The Age of Innocence, "content to view cultural difference from a distance" and that her work is thereby characterized by a spirit of abiding engagement and curiosity.

But so too is it characterized by a marked tension between the old ways and the new. June Howard, for instance, mines this tension in her discussion of Wharton's Old New York novellas which, she claims, blend aspects of nineteenth-century regionalism with a twentieth-century emphasis on a globalized, connected, and thoroughly cosmopolitan feeling of urbanity. The result, in Howard's essay as elsewhere in this collection, is what Donna Campbell labels a feeling of "dual consciousness" with regards to history and modernity. Indeed, it is this duality that makes cosmopolitanism so ambiguous and so alluring a proposition and makes Wharton such an ideal and important figure for its study. [End Page 295]

Sheila Liming
University of North Dakota
...

pdf

Share