Family and Social Change

Zusatztext

Edith Wharton contrived in her novels to sacrifice the portrait of life in time to life by value. But even granting this, one can observe that the profound skill employed by Edith Wharton in moving specially her female characters through large areas and epochs is used not primarily in order to guarantee their reality, but to suggest the essential rootlessness and restlessness that characterise womans, nay mans existence in modern world. Her novels are not peripheral to the central facts of American experience. They are an integral part of the social world. Her fiction is nothing short of an all over picture, where every inch is charged with line and colour and the total metamorphosis of the surface presents textual and material canvass that depicts symbols of a larger reality. The considerable value of her novels as social documents cannot be denied. Like a great artist, Edith Wharton integrates her sense of the amoral individual into a carefully controlled moral context and her fiction can be viewed as a telescope upon a tower which seems to correct false social history and to provide meaning to social life.

Autorenportrait

Ritu Sharma has been teaching English Literature since 1990. Presently she is teaching both graduate and post-graduate classes at Dyal Singh College, Karnal (Haryana). She is associated with research in English, American and Indian DiasporicLiterature for about two decades.

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