Apart from Modernism: Edith Wharton, Politics, and Fiction before WWIRobin Peel
About the Author:
Robin Peel was educated at Kesteven College, Nottingham University and Exeter University and is a Principal Lecturer in English at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom. This is the second of three books on the relationship between Europe and women writers who have lived in Massachusetts, and he is currently researching the subject of Emily Dickinson as reader. The author is married and lives in Exeter.
Apart from Modernism explores the political and cultural influences that helped shape Edith Wharton. Peel examines such subjects as her politics, her relationship to bohemianism and modernist experiment, and her idea of the good society through a discussion of her fiction 1900-1915, starting with a survey of the early novellas and novels, before concentrating in detail on the years which saw the publication of The Reef, Ethan Frome, and The Custom of the Country. Important issues such as Wharton’s reading of gender, empire, and class from a central part of this discussion. The study emphasizes the crucial role that Wharton’s contact with Europe had on her writing, and the significance intellectually and politically of her relationship with Morton Fullerton and her reading of his books on politics. It locates Wharton in her period, surrounded as she was by discourses which called for political and social change, change which an outlook that Peel calls “American Toryism” made her reluctant to embrace. Peel emphasizes how ironical it was that a writer whose ideological beliefs endorsed the importance of home, roots, and tradition should have spent so much of her life as a restless, apparently rootless traveler. ISBN 0-8386-4079-6
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