Apart from Modernism: Edith Wharton, Politics, and Fiction Before World War I

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Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 2005 - Literary Criticism - 345 pages
"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. Her love of motorcars and her excitement about other technological developments such as aeroplanes was inspired by a feeling of exclusivity and not the democratization of culture, which she feared and condemned. France, England, Italy, and America formed the quartet of countries that contained the best and worst of culture, and 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."--BOOK JACKET.

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Contents

Acknowledgments
7
Novels Novellas and Short Stories
43
Apart from Modernism? Mr Proust Mr Bennett
80
Ethan Frome Modernism and a Political Argument 1911
123
Vulgarity Bohemia and The Reef 1912
155
Questions of Commerce
225
Toryism Modernism and War
263
Appendixes
280
Notes
297
Works Cited
331
Copyright

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Page 85 - Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance...
Page 86 - Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
Page 46 - Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision: for the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision.
Page 68 - Inherited tendencies had combined with early training to make her the highly specialized product she was: an organism as helpless out of its narrow range as the sea-anemone torn from the rock. She had been fashioned to adorn and delight; to what other end does nature round the roseleaf and paint the humming-bird's breast?
Page 102 - The process of repression is not to be regarded as an event which takes place once, the results of which are permanent, as when some living thing has been killed and from that time onward is dead...
Page 64 - The environment in which Lily found herself was as strange to her as its inhabitants. She was unacquainted with the world of the fashionable New York hotel — a world overheated, over-upholstered, and over-fitted with mechanical appliances for the gratification of fantastic requirements, while the comforts of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a desert.
Page 11 - Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?
Page 37 - When I was young it used to seem to me that the group in which I grew up was like an empty vessel into which no new wine would ever again be poured. Now I see that one of its uses lay in preserving a few drops of an old vintage too rare to be savoured by a youthful palate; and I should like to atone for my unappreciativeness by trying to revive that faint fragrance.

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