• Edith Wharton and Democracy

ALA 2025 May 21-25 Boston

In French Ways and Their Meaning, Wharton wrote: "If French and Americans are both (as their newspapers assure us) 'democratic,' it gives a notion of how much the term covers!" Indeed. How does the concept of democracy or the "democratic" signify in Wharton's own writing? She has been associated, often derisively, with aristocratic origins and sympathies at least since Vernon Louis Parrington smeared the novelist as a "literary aristocrat" in 1921. But in A Backward Glance, Wharton herself described her antecedents as "purely middle-class" and pointed proudly to one who was a revolutionary. Attending variously to the subtleties of her commentary on France and the US, her chumminess with imperialists, the snobbish asides in her correspondence, and the insurgent energies of her fiction, scholarship has produced a strikingly divergent set of arguments about Wharton's own political views, not to mention the political ideas her work might convey. What is the relevance of Wharton's biography to her representations of democracy? What relationship does her writing posit between social, political, and cultural democracy? How does Wharton's work help us to better understand democracy now?

The panel organizers invite talks concerning "Wharton and Democracy” for a guaranteed panel sponsored by the Edith Wharton Society. Papers might address Wharton and democratic modernity; Wharton and the technologies of modern democracy; Wharton and democracy in the US; Wharton and democracy in France; Wharton and democratic revolutions; Wharton's democratic Americans in Europe; Wharton and the erotics of democracy; Wharton and the democratization of culture; Wharton and popular forms and audiences; Wharton and Victorian liberalism; Wharton and twentieth-century liberalism; democracy and imperialism (American, British, French); democracy and race; democracy and gender; democracy and feminism.  We especially hope to receive submissions for graduate students and emerging scholars as well as more established scholars.

Please submit a 250-word abstract for a 15-20 minute presentation to Emily Coit (emilycoit@uchicago.edu) and Arielle Zibrak (azibrak@uwyo.edu) by Jan 2 2025.