Full Description
The Age of Innocence marks the pinnacle of Edith Wharton's career as one of the finest American novelists of her era. The narrative follows Newland Archer, of upper-crust 1870s New York, whose passion for the mysterious Countess Ellen Olenska leads him to question the very foundations of his way of life. Written in the aftermath of World War I, the novel explores the psychological and cultural paradoxes of desire in a world undergoing unprecedented transformations.
This edition includes a critical introduction and a range of appendices that contextualize the novel in terms of its modernist themes and tensions.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Edith Wharton: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
The Age of Innocence
Appendix A: Wharton's Outlines
Appendix B: Wharton's Correspondence About The Age of Innocence
Appendix C: Contemporary Reviews
Edmund Wilson, "Edith Wharton" (1921)
Vernon L. Parrington, "Our Literary Aristocrat" (1921)
Henry Seidel Canby, "Our America" (1920)
Carl Van Doren, "An Elder America" (1920)
William Lyon Phelps, "As Mrs.Wharton Sees Us" (1920)
Times Literary Supplement, "The Age of Innocence" (1920)
Gilbert Seldes, "The Last Stand" (1921)
Appendix D: From "A Little Girl's New York"
Appendix E: Wharton and Others on the Status of Women
Theodore Roosevelt, "Women's Rights; and the Duties of Both Men and Women" (1912)
Carrie Chapman Catt, "Why the Federal Amendment?" (1917)
Emma Goldman, "Marriage and Love" (1911)
Edith Wharton, "The New Frenchwoman" (1919)
Edith Wharton, "In Fez" (1920)
Appendix F: Ethnographic Discourse, Victorian to Modern
Edward B.Tylor, from Primitive Culture (1871)
John F. McLennan, from Primitive Marriage (1865)
Sir James George Frazer, "Taboo" (1888)
Sir James George Frazer, "Our Debt to the Savage" (1911)
Edward Westermarck, from The History of Human Marriage (1903)
Edward Westermarck, from The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906)
Franz Boas, "The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology" (1896)
Elsie Clews Parsons, from Fear and Conventionality (1914)
Bronislaw Malinowski, from Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)
Ruth Benedict, "The Science of Custom" (1934)
Appendix G: Wharton on Modernity and Tradition
Notebook entry (c. 1918‒1923)
From A Backward Glance (1934)
From Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (1915)
From French Ways and Their Meaning (1919)
From In Morocco (1920)
Select Bibliography
