Our students, who are wrapping up their reading of Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence even as I type, may find some past PWHNY entries useful.
Last year, Cyrus offered a general intro to the novel and later posted about the archives of what Wharton refers to as the “new opera house,” for those who’d like to trace opera in the city beyond the temporal frame of this novel into the moment in which Wharton wrote.
Reaching back to his lecture on Whitman and realism (which this year’s students missed out on, since I took the Whitman this year) he found yet another occasion to share his appreciation of European realist painting.
We’ve also tracked some of Wharton’s engagement with the idea of the Knickerbocker. In recent popular representations of the city, Knickerbocker New York has informed both Mad Men and Gossip Girl, the latter of which included a great Wharton episode last season, complete with the kind of theater-audience-watching scene I love to bring to the class’ attention.
Speaking of the theater, it would be worth students’ while to think about the relationship between the novel of manners, which Cyrus has been lecturing on this week, and the comedies of manners we read early in the semester, including Royall Tyler’s The Contrast and Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion. How do the social concerns raised in the plays find themselves taken up or transformed in Wharton’s novel? Do “manners” perform the same cultural work in these multiple contexts or genres?
Tags: wharton
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