Name: Coming Home
SKU: 61694667
Price: 566.00 TWD
Availability: InStock
Author: Wharton, Edith
ISBN: 9781546922810

Type

Physical Book

Author

Edith Wharton

Publisher

Createspace

Language

English

Pages

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

22.9x15.2x0.4 cm

Weight

0.11 kg.

ISBN13

9781546922810

Synopsis "Coming Home"

Full text.Edith Wharton's First World War short story "Coming Home" was presented to its original readers in 1915-16 as an atrocity narrative-a distinctly contemporary text within Xingu and Other Stories, a book collection whose general emphasis is on old upper-class New York, cosmopolitan marital affairs, and haunted pasts. Early reviews of Coming Home placed it mainly as a well-constructed work that vividly depicts what had become in war propaganda commonplace themes of physical destruction and sexual trespass. Reviewers then and critics since have focused on the use of suppression and omission in the text. Yet this story of wartime atrocities in north-eastern France also enfolds within its layered focalization a meta-narrative containing some familiar topics in Wharton's fiction, including the emergence of female agency, patriarchal recidivism, the transformation of social hegemonies, and hereditary degeneration. If the story addresses received ideas of violation and retribution common in the genre of war-atrocity publications, it does so not only to play upon readers' anticipations of the unfolding plot, but also to explore deeper assumptions about social norms and gender expectations. Beyond that achievement, it poses questions about the reliability of language, thereby undermining the atrocity story genre itself and questioning the reliability of sources and the ability of any writer to represent the unfathomable nature of war. In this vortex of literary and philosophical complications, Coming Home adds a further existential complexity as it ultimately destabilizes the concept of home as a space of secure origins and grounded meaning.

Edith Wharton

(Author)

View Author's Page

Edith Wharton was born in New York in 1862. Her maiden name was Edith Newbold Jones. Her family was upper class, comparable to European aristocracy, and consequently she received a meticulous private education. In 1907, she settled in France, where she became a disciple and friend of Henry James. Her most famous work is The Age of Innocence, published in 1920 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. She is considered the most brilliant American novelist of her generation, admired by intellectuals of the stature of Henry James, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Jean Cocteau, and Ernest Hemingway.

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