Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism

Jennifer Haytock takes on a genuine scholarly argument: Edith Wharton spent considerable energy distancing herself from the modernist label, yet her fiction grapples with the same anxieties — fragmented identity, masculine crisis, alienation, failed connection — that define the movement. Published by Palgrave Macmillan in its American Literature Readings series, the monograph draws on unpublished correspondence alongside close readings of The Reef, A Son at the Front, and Twilight Sleep, giving it archival grounding beyond what most secondary sources provide. The audience is narrow — graduate students and academic specialists in American literature — and no consumer-facing reviews exist to broaden the picture. But for scholars working on Wharton or modernist canon formation, the argument is coherent and the sources are original.