Overview

Reassesses American elitisms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Brings together the insights of recent Victorianist and Americanist scholarship in order to show how Adams, James, and Wharton engage with liberal thinking about whiteness, democracy, and citizenship. Locates these authors in disciplinary history, revealing that their critical responses to Bostonian liberalism feed into the ideas that structure the study of US literary history during the twentieth century. Offers a rich portrait of the Harvard intellectual milieu to which these authors respond, bringing fresh attention to their connections with thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles William Eliot, Charles Eliot Norton, and Barrett Wendell. Arguing that Henry Adams, Henry James and Edith Wharton articulated their political thought in response to the liberalism that reigned in Boston and, more specifically, at Harvard University, this book shows how each of these authors interrogated that liberalism's arguments for education, democracy and the political duties of the cultivated elite. Coit shows that the works of these authors contributed to a realist critique of a liberal New England idealism that fed into the narrative about 'the genteel tradition', which shaped the study of US literature during the twentieth century.

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9781474475419

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"""This first monograph by Emily Coit applies thorough critical scholarship and deep knowledge of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century intellectual history to fashion a convincing argument about the attitudes toward American liberal democracy held by Henry Adams, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. [...] For literary critics and historians, the material that traces how interpretations of the genteel tradition were developed and manipulated in the twentieth century is both original and persuasive. Wharton scholars will have much to absorb from the monograph's varied contextual and comparative elements."" -William Blazek, Liverpool Hope University"

Author Information

Emily Coit is Assistant Instructional Professor in English at the University of Chicago. She studies the history of thinking about education, citizenship, and democracy. Her work has appeared ELH, The Henry James Review, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and several edited collections. She is currently co-editing A Landscape Painter and Other Tales, a volume of short stories for the Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James.

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