Wharton and Cather

This year’s work in Wharton studies includes one book and 12 essays or book chapters of high quality. Scholars analyze a wide range of genres, including poetry, fiction, and nonfiction across the equally broad span of Wharton’s early, middle, and late career. Strong interest in The House of Mirth continues, as evidenced by four excellent essays that address naturalism, consumer culture, biblical allusion, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Aesthetic connoisseurship in The Custom of the Country and adoptive kinship in Summer also garner attention, as do novels of the 1920s. Authors bring new awareness to Wharton’s poetry; explore ghost stories in the context of World War I; and analyze use of domestic space, with reference to Wharton’s life, The Decoration of Houses, and immigrant literature by Anzia Yezierska.

Cather scholarship this year has continued along many of the same lines seen in recent years: analyses that see her work within some larger intellectual or historical context are frequent, as are studies of connections with other writers and artists; influence and biographical studies continue to be offered while, at the same time, those that advance questions of sexuality seem less concerned with Cather’s own than her depiction of it within her fiction. All of this year’s work has been done in essays, with another collection from the Cather Studies series prominent. Owing to the continuing discovery of previously unknown archival materials, as well as a loosening of strictures controlling the reproduction of autograph materials, a notable feature of this year’s scholarship has been works that take up new things. The fall 2011 issue of the Willa Cather Newsletter and Review, for instance, contains an essay describing and analyzing “Paestum,” an unpublished poem found in Cather’s scrapbook from her trip to Europe in 1908; the same issue has two pieces on newly found fragments from Cather’s unfinished Avignon story, “Hard Punishments,” one of which both reproduces and transcribes those fragments. This is a trend that promises to continue, since 2013 will see the first publication of a selection of Cather’s letters by Knopf. Of special note this year is Andrew Jewell and Brian L. Pytlik Zillig’s, “‘Counted Out at Last’: Text Analysis on the Willa Cather Archive,” pp. 169–84 in American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age; Jewell is the person responsible for the online Cather archive at the University of Nebraska and Pytlik Zillig is the author of the analytical tool Token X, which is available on that site and that they use here; together they demonstrate the massed power of computer-based textual analysis.

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

i Edith Wharton

a. Books

Irene Billeter Sauter’s comparative study New York City: “Gilt Cage” or “Promised Land”? Representations of Urban Space in Edith Wharton and Anzia Yezierska (Peter Lang) analyzes urban spaces in chapters organized around architecture, streets, crowds, hotels, opera boxes, kitchens, and libraries. She pairs the Old New Yorker Wharton with immigrant Yezierska to show how for Wharton space is a “well planned, well-laid out, [sic] and expertly rendered stage upon which her protagonists develop” in major novels and selected stories. The New York City home is a “citadel” that isolates and entraps as much as it protects from outside influences, the library a repository of culture and sanctuary or retreat, and the hotel a site of surreal luxury. Noteworthy are points that the street and pavement exert negative influences in The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and Twilight Sleep, and that representations of New York City change as Wharton’s work develops. For example, Fifth Avenue dominates The Age of Innocence but is “unspecific and vague” in The Mother’s Recompense, a fact that accounts for the latter providing a less satisfactory reading experience. Stressing differences between the two writers, Sauter yet finds intriguing commonality in the opposed trajectories of wealth and poverty in Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Yezierska’s Salome of the Tenements.

b. Book Chapters and...