Nynke Dorhout Joins CWEWh Advisory Board

CWEWh is pleased to announce that Nynke Dorhout, Librarian at The Mount, has joined the CWEWh Advisory Board.

Nynke Dorhout holds a Master of Arts degree from Leiden University, the Netherlands. She is currently the Librarian at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s Home in Lenox, Massachusetts. After serving for ten years as Assistant Collections Manager at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum, she has been in charge of Edith Wharton’s 2,700 volume library, archives, and collections at The Mount since 2011. As librarian, she assists researchers from around the world. Her further responsibilities include inventory, documentation, storage, preservation, acquisitions and loans, as well as specialized library tours, programs, online content, and exhibits.

Advisory Board

  • Dame Janet Beer, Vice-Chancellor and Professor, Liverpool University
  • Nancy Bentley, Professor, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania 
  • Nynke Dorhout, Librarian, The Mount
  • Susan Goodman, Professor, Department of English, H. Fletcher Brown Chair of the Humanities, University of Delaware (emerita) 
  • Dame Hermione Lee, President, Wolfson College, University of Oxford 
  • Stephen Orgel, Professor, Department of English, The Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Humanities, Stanford University
  • Kenneth Price, Hillegass University Professor of American Literature, Department of English, University of Nebraska-Lincoln 
  • Wesley Raabe, Graduate Studies Coordinator and Associate Professor, Kent State University 
  • Elaine Showalter, Professor, Department of English, Princeton University (emerita), 
  • Susan Tomlinson, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Massachusetts Boston 
  • Shafquat Towheed, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), The Open University
  • Linda Wagner-Martin, Frank Borden Hanes Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (emerita) 

The Complete Works of Edith Wharton Welcomes Maureen Montgomery as Editor of Volume 28, The Buccaneers.

The Complete Works of Edith Wharton Welcomes Maureen Montgomery as Editor of Volume 28, The Buccaneers.

From https://www.canterbury.ac.nz/arts/contact-us/people/maureen-montgomery.html

My first book, ‘Gilded Prostitution: Money, Migration and Marriage, 1870-1914’ (Routledge, 1989) was a study of transatlantic relations and culture focusing on American women who married into the British peerage. I followed this up with a study of American women in the bourgeois elite, concentrating on New York City and drawing upon the fiction of Edith Wharton, entitled Displaying Women: Spectacles of Leisure in Edith Wharton’s New York (Routledge, 1998). My current book project, Whiteness and Politeness: The Racialization of Civilization, 1880-1930, is another venture into the cultural history of the period and examines travel literature, etiquette manuals, and novels of manners as a way of understanding how the American bourgeois elite conceptualized national identity at a time of fraught racial tensions.

New Books by CWEWh Volume Editors: Stephen Arch, Approaches to Teaching the Novels of James Fenimore Cooper

Stephen Carl Arch is the CWEWh Volume Editor for Volume III, Short Stories II.

Approaches to Teaching the Novels of James Fenimore Cooper

  • Editors: Stephen Carl Arch, Keat Murray

A cosmopolitan author who spent nearly a decade in Europe and was versed in the works of his British and French contemporaries, James Fenimore Cooper was also deeply concerned with the America of his day and its history. His works embrace themes that have dominated American literature since: the frontier; the oppression of Native Americans by Europeans; questions of race, gender, and class; and rugged individualism, as represented by figures like the pirate, the spy, the hunter, and the settler. His most memorable character, Natty Bumppo, has entered into American popular culture.

The essays in this volume offer students bridges to Cooper’s novels, which grapple with complex moral issues that are still crucial today. Engaging with film adaptations, cross-culturalism, animal studies, media history, environmentalism, and Indigenous American poetics, the essays offer new ways to bring these novels to life in the classroom.

The Complete Works of Edith Wharton Welcomes Shafquat Towheed as Editor of Volume 18, The Age of Innocence

The Complete Works of Edith Wharton Welcomes Shafquat Towheed as Editor of Volume 18, The Age of Innocence.

From https://www.open.ac.uk/people/sst46

The main thrust of my research is in nineteenth and twentieth century British and American literature, with a particular interest in the history of the book. Within this broad and inclusive subject, I have three specific areas of interest: (1) the history of reading; (2) the relationship between authors and publishers; and (3) the relationship between copyright law and literature. In addition, I also work on South Asian writing in English.

I have written, edited, and co-edited 8 books, and my articles have appeared in leading scholarly journals, such as Victorian StudiesBook HistoryPublishing HistoryNineteenth-Century Contexts, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Journal of Victorian CultureEnglish Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Primerjalna Književnost (Comparative Literature) and The Yearbook of English Studies. I regularly review for a number of peer-reviewed journals.

The Complete Works of Edith Wharton Welcomes James Gifford as Editor of Volume 1, Poems

The Complete Works of Edith Wharton Welcomes James Gifford as Editor of Volume 1, Poems.

From the Fairleigh Dickinson University web site at https://www.fdu.edu/profiles/james_gifford/ :

I joined FDU’s Vancouver Campus in 2008 and also teach online courses for students on all FDU campuses. I’ve been a Visiting Professor of English in the graduate program at Simon Fraser University and was an Assistant Professor (LT) and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Victoria before joining FDU. In Fall 2017, I was Visiting Professor at Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès. I also pursue significant studies in Music, opera performance, and Digital Humanities. My monographs include Personal Modernisms: Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes (Alberta, 2014) and A Modernist Fantasy: Anarchism, Modernism, and the Radical Fantastic (ELS Editions, 2018). I have also edited several collections, scholarly editions, and open education resources. These include critical editions of Lawrence Durrell’s first two novels (praised in the Times Literary Supplement); a collection of Durrell’s prose, From the Elephant’s Back; an open edition of the 1923 and 1924 textual state of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time; and an open edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. I am the primary or sole author of more than fifty articles and book chapters in publications ranging from Modernism/modernityEnglish Studies in CanadaTextual PracticeJournal of Modern LiteratureCanadian LiteratureMosaic, and The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature. I have regularly sat on prize committees, including the MLA Book Prize for Scholarly Editions, the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize, and the Robert K. Martin book prize of the Canadian Association of American Studies. I also publish poetry and creative non-fiction.

Sheila Liming on The Age of Innocence (September 14, 4 p.m. EST)

Sheila Liming, CWEWh volume editor for Volume 23, Twilight Sleep, has also edited The Age of Innocence for the Norton Library.
​​​​
Wednesday, September 14 at 4:00pm Eastern / 11:00am Pacific 
You and all interested students and colleagues can ​​​​​RSVP here to receive a Zoom link to attend. All are welcome.

In her talk, Liming will discuss  why the work has endured as an often read (and taught) work. The event will conclude with an audience Q&A and is part of our Norton Library and Norton Critical Editions Speakers Series. Curious about the differences between the two series? Learn more here.

If you’re interested but cannot attend live, I encourage you to register anyway since a recording of the event will be emailed to all registrants.

“L’Amérique en guerre” in Commentaire

From Virginia Ricard:

I thought it might interest some members of the Edith Wharton Society to know that the spring issue (n° 177) of the influential French review, Commentaire, has just published  “L’Amérique en guerre” with a short introduction by Jean-Claude Casanova who read the translation in the February 2018 issue of the TLS and then found the original text in the March 1918 issue of the Revue Hebdomadaire. French admirers of Wharton (of which there are many) will now be able to acquaint themselves with another aspect of the talent of the “grande romancière, poétesse et essayiste américaine.”

https://www.commentaire.fr/numeros/printemps-2022-177

Edith Wharton: Designing the Drawing Room

An online exhibition at the Beinecke Library, Yale University.

https://onlineexhibits.library.yale.edu/s/edith-wharton/page/introduction

One century ago, Edith Wharton (1862–1937) published The Age of Innocence, a novel that has become one of her most beloved works. Less known is her first full-length publication, an 1897 interior design treatise titled The Decoration of Houses. Wharton’s keen interest in architecture and the design of interiors and gardens remained with her throughout her career. While she published novels, stories, poems, and nonfiction, she directed the design of her homes, from her country estate The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts, to her New York City residence on Park Avenue.

Many of Wharton’s ideas about interior design react against the lavish frills and profusion of patterned cloth present in her childhood home, pictured here, at West 25th Street in NYC

Wharton ca. 1920, the year The Age of Innocence was published

Edith Wharton: Designing the Drawing Room brings together both aspects of Wharton’s career. It explores the rules she defined in The Decoration of Houses and their application in her own homes alongside her attention to design details in the handwritten manuscript of The Age of Innocence. These pages reveal Wharton’s deep engagement with the material world during her writing process and in the published novel.

This exhibit focuses on Wharton’s treatment of the drawing room, known to her as a female space during a period of limiting gendered customs. In the world she describes in much of her writing, the drawing room was a specific sort of sitting room to which women would traditionally “withdraw” following dinner. The drawing room was also a space in which women could spend their days and receive guests. As such, drawing rooms provide a particularly rich context for understanding Wharton’s elite New York City society at the turn of the twentieth century and the role of women within it.

https://onlineexhibits.library.yale.edu/s/edith-wharton/page/edith-wharton-welcome

The Decoration of Houses will be published as part of Volume 6: Writings on Architecture, Design, and Gardens,
ed. Francis Morrone
, in The Complete Works of Edith Wharton.

Dr Paul Ohler on ‘Edith Wharton’s Early Short Stories, Thursday 21 January 2021 (12 pm EST/ 5pm UK)

Thursday 21 January 2021 (12 pm EST/ 5pm UK) 

Edith Wharton’s Birthday Talk
Dr Paul Ohler on ‘Edith Wharton’s Early Short Stories’
Thursday 21 January 2021 (12 pm EST/ 5pm UK) 

A Joint Event with the Edith Wharton Society and the Transatlantic Literary Women 

To celebrate the week of Edith Wharton’s birthday, the Edith Wharton Society and the Transatlantic Literary Women are joining forces to hold a special talk with renowned Wharton scholar and editor, Dr Paul Ohler. Everyone’s invited!  

If you’re interested in Edith Wharton, short stories, late nineteenth/early twentieth century literature, publishing history, genre, then trust us: you will NOT want to miss Paul’s talk on Wharton’s often neglected early short stories! Please spread the word. 

In a well-known letter of 1902, Henry James admonished Edith Wharton to take up the “American subject [and] Do New York! The 1st-hand account is precious.” It was somewhat redundant advice, given that she had already published six short stories set in the city. In fact, Wharton had devoted immense energy to the genre for over a decade by the time of James’s letter, publishing her first story in 1891, when “Mrs. Manstey’s View” appeared in Scribner’s Magazine. By 1903 she had published thirty more, most of which remain little read. Focussing on “Mrs. Manstey’s View”, “The Duchess at Prayer”, and “A Cup of Cold Water”, this talk outlines Wharton’s work in the genre during the first phase of her career. Subjects will include the variety of characters and situations in Wharton’s stories, their range of geographical and historical settings, the array of modes—realist, naturalist, historical, dramatic, gothic—Wharton worked in, and the tonal variety of tales that rely on irony, parody, humor, pathos, and terror to achieve their effects. 

Paul Ohler teaches at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, British Columbia. He is the author of Edith Wharton’s Evolutionary Conception: Darwinian Allegory in Her Major Novels (Routledge), and articles and book chapters on Wharton, including an essay in America’s Darwin: Darwinian Theory and U.S. Literary Culture (U of Georgia Press). His current projects include editing Volume 2, Short Stories I: 1891-1903 of The Complete Works of Edith Wharton, which is supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant. His most recent essay, “Creative Process and Literary Form in Edith Wharton’s Archive” appears in The New Edith Wharton Studies edited by Jennifer Haytock and Laura Rattray (CUP 2020). He is editor of the Edith Wharton Review and past president of the Edith Wharton Society.  

If you’d like to join us, please email: transatlantic.women@gmail.com and we’ll send you a secure Zoom link in the week of the event.