Introduction

Abstract

This study has two interrelated impulses: specifically, to expand the ways we view Edith Wharton and her writing and, more broadly, to rethink the way we discuss literary modernism. Although usually considered a feminist realist writer, Wharton and her oeuvre do not rest comfortably in those bounds. She was a curious woman, and that curiosity produced decades of sustained creative engagement with the world around her. Literary modernism historically excludes her, however, because the established definition of modernism has been built around a masculinist vision of art and the individual. I show that Wharton concerned herself closely with the ideas of modernism: the break from Victorianism, the impact of World War I on the individual and society, the isolated self, the possibilities and limitations of language, and the nature of the artist and the artist’s role in society—it is on these last issues that she differs most from modern writers, and these differences are the source of her greater unease with the modernist movement.