Novelty and the Market: Edith Wharton

This chapter discusses Edith Wharton’s critical assessment of modern consumer culture, whose ascendancy she associated with standardised sartorial and literary tastes. By showing her indebtedness to Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary theories, it argues that she was suspicious of fashion’s imperative for ‘newness’ and thought that its cultural dominance was detrimental to cultural and artistic progress. Alongside essays such as ‘The Vice of Reading’, ‘The Great American Novel’, ‘Permanent Values in Fiction’, and ‘Fiction and Criticism’ as well as unpublished material from the Edith Wharton Collection in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the chapter focuses on novels such as The Touchstone (1900), The Custom of the Country (1913), The Children (1928), Hudson River Bracketed (1929) and The Gods Arrive (1932).