Edith Wharton: Sex, Satire and the Older Woman

by Beer, Janet; Horner, Avril

• ISBN13: 9781403941268
• ISBN10: 1403941262
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-10-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Wharton's late and critically-neglected novels are reclaimed as experimental in form and radical in content in this book, which also suggests that her portrayal of older female characters in her last six novels anticipates contemporary unease about the cultural marginalization of the older woman in Western society.

Author Biography

AVRIL HORNER is Emeritus Professor of English, Kingston University, UK. She is the co-author, with Sue Zlosnik, of Gothic and the Comic Turn (2005), Daphne du Maurier, Writing Identity and the Gothic Imagination (1998), Landscapes of Desire: Metaphors in Modern Women's Fiction (1990); editor of European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange 1760-1960 (2002); co-editor of Iris Murdoch and Morality (2010); Le Gothic: Influences and Appropriations in Europe and America (2008) and Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality (1990).

JANET BEER is Vice Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University, UK. She is the author of Edith Wharton: Traveller in the Land of Letters (1990), Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction (1997), Edith Wharton (2002); editor of The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin (2008); co-editor of Special Relationships: Anglo-American Antagonisms and Affinities, 1854-1936 (2002), American Feminism: Key Source Documents 1848-1920 (2002), The Awakening: A Sourcebook (2004), Edith Wharton's 'The House of Mirth' (2007).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Mother's Recompense
Twilight Sleep
The Children
Hudson River Bracketed
The Gods Arrive
The Buccaneers
Bibliography
Index