Wretched Exotic

The Editors: Katherine Joslin is the author of Edith Wharton in the Women Writers Series and a contributor to Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou. Her work includes articles on women writers in the early twentieth century. A founding member of the Edith Wharton Society, she serves on its Executive Board. In 1991, she directed the international conference, «Edith Wharton in Paris.» She is an associate professor of English at Western Michigan University.
Alan Price is an associate professor of English at the Hazleton Campus of The Pennsylvania State University. His essays on Wharton, Hemingway, Dreiser, and other American authors have appeared in a number of scholarly journals. He has twice been honored with teaching awards at his local campus, and in 1991 he received Penn State's university-wide George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. A past president of the Edith Wharton Society, he was the associate director of the international literary conference «Edith Wharton in Paris» in 1991.

Marking a new direction in Edith Wharton studies, this collection of provocative essays considers her as a cross-cultural writer. A resident of France for the last thirty years of her life, Wharton described herself as a "wretched exotic", an American by birth, but a European by inclination and, in fundamental ways, a true citizen of neither. Shari Benstock, Millicent Bell, and Susan Goodman discuss the ambivalent nature of her long residence in France. Their biographical accounts provide background for essays by Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Linda Wagner-Martin, Judith Sensibar, Roger Asselineau, and other leading scholars who analyze Wharton as an expatriate, a European traveler, a WWI participant, and an international literary figure.