Edith Wharton's brave new politics

Abstract

Most critics claim that Wharton's creative achievement peaked with her novels The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, dismissing her later fiction as reactionary, sensationalistic and aesthetically inferior. In Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics, Dale M. Bauer overturns these traditional conclusions. She shows that Wharton's post-World War I writings are acutely engaged with the cultural debates of her day - from reproductive control, to authoritarian politics, to mass culture and its ramifications. Bauer examines the social and political critique implicit in Wharton's later works, from Summer (1917) to her last novel The Bucaneers (published posthumously in 1938). She integrates historical, political and feminist concerns to recast Wharton's antimodernism and to recover the novelist's understanding of public life and private morality. Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics illustrates how literary criticism can change the course of a literary career. In her refutation of the dominant interpretations of Wharton's literary work, Bauer challenges the prevailing conception of this genteel woman of letters, showing that to read Wharton's works in isolation from her complex politics is to misunderstand Wharton's aims and to miss entirely the exhilarating power of these later fictions.