Wharton and Cather

Edith Wharton scholarship flourishes with recovered texts and archival finds, the centennial of Summer, and continued exploration of Wharton's dialog with romantic, realist, naturalist, and modernist ideas. Most notably, Mary Chinery and Laura Rattray discovered Wharton's "only extant, original full-length play," The Shadow of a Doubt, at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas and published it in the Edith Wharton Review. Such a major discovery informs interpretations of Wharton's early career and its influence on later writing. Many novels, novellas, and nonfiction works receive attention in multiple studies, notably, The Decoration of Houses; The House of Mirth; The Fruit of the Tree; A Motor-Flight Through France; The Custom of the Country; Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort; Bunner Sisters; Summer; The Age of Innocence; and A Son at the Front. In more than 40 book chapters and articles, scholars employ a variety of approaches to Wharton's works, including readings of economics and material culture, identity, Gothicism, war, literary movements, and global perspectives. Comparative studies advance our understanding of the dialog between Wharton and such writers as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hannah Webster Foster, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Pauline Hopkins, Henry James, Edith Summers Kelley, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Oscar Wilde. Attention to pedagogy continues with an edited collection prepared for high school and undergraduate students as well as a special section in the Edith Wharton Review for international scholars teaching Wharton outside the United States.

This watershed year in Cather studies saw the opening of the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and the rebranding of the Willa Cather Newsletter and Review, beginning with volume 60, as the Willa Cather Review, to highlight its scholarly focus (hence the shift within this chapter from the abbreviation WCNR to WCR). A new volume of Cather Studies titled Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux ranges across Cather's oeuvre while showcasing The Song of the Lark as the crucible of Cather's emergent modernism. A special issue of WCNR on the Great War splits attention between One of Ours and, less expectedly, My Ántonia, which—in the run-up to its centennial—inspired several important contextual readings this year. Visual arts approaches to Cather remain a steady industry, leading one to anticipate a monograph on the subject to complement such books on, say, James and Wharton. Groundbreaking archival studies by Melissa Homestead signal that research on Cather's composition and publication is still a work in progress. The Cather chapter in John Plotz's Semi-detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens serves as a reminder to expect fresh perspectives to Cather from specialists in other fields.

We dedicate our review this year to Elsa Nettles, author of the Wharton and Cather chapter for American Literary Scholarship volumes 1998–2002, who passed just as 2017 approached. She would have been pleased to see the wide-ranging depth of scholarship on both authors this year.

i Edith Wharton

a. Books

Myrto Drizou edits a valuable introductory text for high school and undergraduate students in Critical Insights: Edith Wharton (Salem). Drizou's "On Edith Wharton" (pp. xv–xxviii) and Elif S. Armbruster's "Biography of Edith Wharton" (pp. xxix–xxxiv) offer engaging overviews of the author's social circumstances, intellectual frameworks, and biographical contexts. There follows four chapters under "Critical Contexts" and ten under "Critical Readings." Charlee Sterling's "Edith Wharton and the Paradox of Fin-de-Siècle Modernity" (pp. 3–17) highlights the dramatic changes of this time period and the range of literary responses to economic, technological, and social change. Dale Bauer contributes the incisive "Wharton Studies" (pp. 18–34), with early critical responses and the evolution of Wharton scholarship within the wider context of literary studies. Rounding out this section are essays that further orient students to the field: Isabelle Groenhof's "Edith Wharton and the Rise of the New Woman" (pp. 35–47) and Hanna Huber's "'The One End to Which Her Whole Organism Tended': Social Evolution in Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman" (pp. 48–62). The critical readings section...