Edith Wharton: Traveller in the Land of Letters

'...in this study, Goodwyn sets the standard for Wharton criticism.' - Judith E. Funston, American Literature 'Janet Goodwyn sets out, by looking at Wharton's appropriation of different cultures, to nail the 'canard' that she was 'but a pale imitator of Henry James' - Hermione Lee, Times Literary Supplement `The Land of Letters was henceforth to be my country and I gloried in my new citizenship'. So Edith Wharton described her elation upon the publication of her first collection of short stories; her nationality was henceforth `writer' and as such she moved with ease between landscapes, between cultures and between genres in the telling of her tales. In this acclaimed study of Wharton's work, the discussion is shaped by her use of specific landscapes and her consistent concern with ideas of place: the American's place in the Western world, the woman's place in her own and in European society, and the author's place in the larger life of a culture. Her landscapes, both actual and metaphorical, give structure and point to the individual texts and to the whole body of her work.