MACMILLAN Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

Based on extensive new archival research, Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction offers the first study of Wharton’s full engagement with original writing in genres outside those with which she has been most closely identified. So much more than an acclaimed novelist and short story writer, Wharton is reconsidered in this book as a controversial playwright, a gifted poet, a trailblazing travel writer, an innovative and subversive critic, a hugely influential design writer, and an author who overturned the conventions of autobiographical form. Her versatility across genres did not represent brief sidesteps, temporary diversions from what has long been read as her primary role as novelist. Each was pursued fully and whole-heartedly, speaking to Wharton’s very sense of herself as an artist and her connected vision of artistry and art. The stories of these other Edith Whartons, born through her extraordinary dexterity across a wide range of genres, and their impact on our understanding of her career, are the focus of this new study, revealing a bolder, more diverse, subversive and radical writer than has long been supposed. Review “Laura Rattray expands our visions of Edith Wharton and, in doing so, makes Wharton’s life and authorship far more representative of women’s experience than previously understood. Edith Wharton and Genre is indispensable reading not only for Wharton scholars but also all those interested in women’s writing across genre.” (Myrto Drizou, Women's Studies, February 1, 2021) Review “Laura Rattray’s meticulously researched and beautifully written study fully establishes not only Wharton’s amazing versatility as an author, but her virtuosity in genres as diverse as poetry, travel-writing, play-writing, design, life-writing, and literary theory. In lively prose, Edith Wharton and Genre also offers a more socially conscious and feminist Wharton, a woman who was often, as Rattray argues, a “trailblazer.” So, too, is Rattray, who has changed the way we will think of Edith Wharton.” (Julie Olin-Ammentorp, Professor of English, Le Moyne College, is the author of Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture and of Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War. She is a past president of the Edith Wharton Society) “Edith Wharton and Genre offers a radical and radicalizing perspective on Wharton and American literary history. By making the author’s poetry, drama, autobiography, and―most impressively―literary theory the center of her inquiry, Laura Rattray reveals the creative and intellectual deliberateness of Wharton’s generic choices and their significance to the long nineteenth century.” (Susan Tomlinson, Associate Professor of English, University of Massachusetts Boston and Editor, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers) “In Rattray’s hands, Edith Wharton is re-presented as a writer mastering a wide range of genres beyond the celebrated fiction.  Wharton’s achievements in poetry, drama, architecture and design, criticism, memoir, and travel writing emerge as sites for her most confident, radical experiments.  This game-changing book will lay to rest the image of the grand dame, showing Wharton to defy categorization and to be as “large” and full of “multitudes” as the Whitman she so admired.” (Emily J. Orlando, Professor of English at Fairfield University (USA) and author of Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts) “Rattray’s volume shows that Wharton consistently rejected shortcuts across the multiple genres in which she wrote. The same might be said of Rattray’s scholarship. In an authoritative, critical voice based on careful research, Rattray transforms the successful lady novelist created, in part, out of gender and social biases into the experimental woman artist who embraces risks in both subject matter and presentation.” (Rita Bode, Professor of English Literature, Trent University, Canada) “Laura Rattray places between the covers of a single book an o