The Complete Works of Edith Wharton Welcomes Gianfranca Balestra as Co-Editor of Volume 29, Translations and Adaptations.

Gianfranca Balestra was Full Professor of American Literature at the University of Siena, Italy. She has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, with monographs on Edith Wharton, Edgar Allan Poe, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her latest book Riflessi del Grande Gatsby. Traduzioni, cinema, teatro, musica (Rome: Artemide, 2019) analyzes the numerous Italian translations of Fitzgerald’s novel as well as its film, theater and music adaptations. Her scholarship on Wharton includes a book on the ghost stories (I fantasmi di Edith Wharton, Rome: Bulzoni, 1993), the editing with Introductions of Italian translations of The Reef and The Touchstone, and nearly two dozen essays and reviews. Some of these articles discuss Wharton’s works related to Italy (such as The Valley of Decision, Italian Backgrounds, Italian Villas and their Gardens, and poems about Italian art), are published in Italian, and represent a significant contribution to the writer’s reception in Italy.  Many of her articles in English have appeared in international journals and various collections of essays. Among these: “What the Children Knew: The Manuscript of Disintegration, An Unfinished Novel” (1995), “’For the Use of the Magazine Morons’: Edith Wharton Rewrites the Tale of the Fantastic” (1996), “Edith Wharton’s Italian Tale: Language Exercise and Social Discourse” (1999), “Women Writers on the Verge of the Twentieth Century: Edith Wharton et.al.” (2014). Gianfranca  Balestra is co-editor, for the part on Italian translations, of vol. 29 Translations and Adaptations in The Complete Works of Edith Wharton, to be published by Oxford University Press.