Teaching Edith Wharton’s Major Novels and Short Fiction

This book translates recent scholarship into pedagogy for teaching Edith Wharton’s widely celebrated and less-known fiction to students in the twenty-first century. It comprises such themes as American and European cultures, material culture, identity, sexuality, class, gender, law, history, journalism, anarchism, war, addiction, disability, ecology, technology, and social media in historical, cultural, transcultural, international, and regional contexts. It includes Wharton’s works compared to those of other authors, taught online, read in foreign universities, and studied in film adaptations. 

1. Introduction.- 2. Part I. Culture and History: Chapter 1. Reading in Three Dimensions: Using Material Culture to Teach The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence.- 3. Chapter 2. Getting to Know the Community: Using Raymond Williams’s Concept of “Knowable Communities” to Teach Wharton’s Summer.- 4. Chapter 3. Using Women Reporting War to Teach Edith Wharton’s “Writing a War Story”: An Added Context for Gendered Writing.- 5. Chapter 4. An Argument for Teaching The Marne: A Long Overlooked Example of Wharton’s Wartime Writings. - 6. Chapter 5. Historicizing Adaptation: The Age of Innocence in the Context of 1930s Hollywood. - 7. Part II. Wharton and Other Authors: Chapter 1. Survival versus Thriving: Social Mobility in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Edna Ferber’s So Big.- 8. Chapter 2. Developing Sympathy: Teaching Edith Wharton’s Summer with Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel.- 8. Chapter 3. Teaching Edith Wharton and Henry James in The Netherlands.- 9. Part III. Wharton and Critical Lenses: Chapter 1. “Granite Outcroppings but Half-Emerged from the Soil”: Using Ethan Frome in a Gateway Course for the English Major.- 10. Chapter 2. “We’re near each other only if we stay far from each other”: Teaching Psychoanalytic Desire in The Age of Innocence.- 11. Chapter 3. Social Darwinism, Feminism, and Performative Identity in Wharton’s “The Last Asset”.- 12. Chapter 4. Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome and the History of Literary Scholarship.- 13. Part IV. Wharton and Interdisciplinary Contexts: Chapter 1. Modeling Addiction: Teaching The House of Mirth in the Context of Addiction Studies.- 14. Chapter 2. Ecoliteracy and Edith Wharton: The Ecosomatic Paradigm and the Poetics of Paratexts in Ethan Frome.- 15. Chapter 3. Teaching Edith Wharton’s The Children in The Anarchist Tradition in Literature Course.- 16. Part V. Wharton and the World Today: Chapter 1. Wharton Goes Online: Reimagining the Traditional Graduate Seminar.- 17. Chapter 2. Students Abroad - in the Classroom: A Transatlantic Assignment on Wharton’s “Roman Fever”.- 18. Chapter 3. Slouching toward the Posthuman: Teaching Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep.

Ferdâ Asya is professor of English at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, USA, and editor of American Writers in Europe: 1850 to the Present (2013)