Edith Wharton's Social Register

Edith Wharton's wide reading in the nascent disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and evolutionary theory of her day plays a significant role in her fictions. She understood her world in binary terms of belonging and exile, or spatial boundaries and exclusions, invoking the vocabulary of tribal behavior and Darwinian thought to analyze her own world of paleo-New York and that of the transgressive invaders who threatened it. In linked thematic sections, Claire Preston considers ideas of tribal inclusion and banishment, buccaneer figures whose money-energy overcomes tribal demarcations, and expatriatism, suggesting that, against the claims of realism, Wharton should in fact be included in the early Modernist canon.

Edith Wharton's wide reading in the nascent disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and evolutionary theory of her day plays a significant role in her fictions. She understood her world in binary terms of belonging and exile, or spatial boundaries and exclusions, invoking the vocabulary of tribal behavior and Darwinian thought to analyze her own world of paleo-New York and that of the transgressive invaders who threatened it. In linked thematic sections, Claire Preston considers ideas of tribal inclusion and banishment, buccaneer figures whose money-energy overcomes tribal demarcations, and expatriatism, suggesting that, against the claims of realism, Wharton should in fact be included in the early Modernist canon.

American Literary Realism

Sheds new light on the interplay between Wharton's fictional and social milieux.

Claire Preston is Fellow and Lecturer in English at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and Newton Trust Lecturer in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University.