Although Edith Wharton is usually identified with the "old New York" of such masterworks as The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, she spent ten years living and writing in New England, a setting that appears in two novels, a novella, and fully a quarter of her short stories. In these works Wharton turns from portraying the monied and the mannered to probing inscrutable psyches and souls. The New England of these tales - which range from light comedy to horror - becomes a metaphor for fierce poverty, cultural barrenness, and an oppressive Puritan heritage that both fascinated and repelled Wharton. Thus the frigid, engulfing winter of Starkfield buries Ethan Frome in a living death. That sense of moral and emotional confinement also appears in "The Angel at the Grave," as a young woman senses she has been "walled alive into a tomb hung with the effigies of dead ideas." In "The Lamp of Psyche," a visit to Boston relatives sheds new light on a woman's marriage; "Xingu" gently satirizes the snobbery of small-town "huntresses of erudition"; "Bewitched" and "All Souls" explore the theme of witchcraft. Barbara A. White's insightful introduction suggests that in these stories Wharton "seems to have projected onto New England aspects of herself that she most feared: repression, coldness, inarticulateness, mental starvation, and even lack of high culture."

Wharton's New England: Seven Stories and Ethan Frome (Hardscrabble Classics)

Literature & Fiction

WHARTON,EDITH

United States

University of New Hampshire Press

This unique interdisciplinary essay collection offers a fresh perspective on the active involvement of American women authors in the nineteenth-century transatlantic world. Internationally diverse contributors explore topics ranging from women’s social and political mobility to their authorship and activism. While a number of essays focus on such well-known writers as Margaret Fuller, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, other, perhaps lesser-known authors are also included, such as E. D. E. N. Southworth, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth Peabody, Jeannette Hart, and Laura Richards.These essays show the spectrum of interests and activities in which nineteenth-century women were involved as they moved, geographically and metaphorically, toward gaining their independence and the right to control their lives. Traveling far and wide—to Italy, France, Great Britain, and the Bahamas—these writers came into contact with realities far different from their own. On topics ranging from homeopathy and literary endeavors to politics and revolution, they conversed with others, reaching and inspiring transnational audiences with their words and deeds, and creating a space for self-expression in the rapidly changing transatlantic world.

Transatlantic Conversations: Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Encounters with Italy and the Atlantic World (Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies)

History & Criticism

In this thematically rich book, Mary Kathleen Eyring examines authors whose writings were connected with their charitable endeavors, which addressed the worst by-products of the brisk maritime commerce in Atlantic seaport cities in the first half of the nineteenth century. She argues that charitable institutions and societies emerged in this era because they captured and contained the discontent of imperiled and impoverished groups, thereby effectively thwarting the development of a revolutionary class in America.According to Eyring, the men and women who most successfully wrote about and engaged in benevolent work strategically connected their work with the affluence generated by maritime commerce. The water trades supported the growth of the American publishing industry, but they also generated both vast inequities in wealth and physically and economically hazardous conditions that, in the absence of a welfare state, required the intervention of benevolent societies. Laborers in Atlantic port cities barred from lucrative professions by gender, race, physical ability, or social status found a way to make a living wage by conjoining the literary with the charitable—and attaching both to a profit structure. In so doing, they transformed the nature of American benevolence and gave rise to the nonprofit sector, which has since its inception provided discontented laborers with a forum in which to express their critique of for-profit American enterprise, by imitating it.In Captains of Charity, Eyring looks at writers who overcame their marginalized status by bringing together the strands of maritime industry, publishing, and benevolence. These include Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, two black clergymen who managed a massive relief effort when refugees fleeing revolution in Haiti transported the yellow fever virus to Philadelphia in 1793; Nancy Prince, a free woman of color who sought her livelihood in the Protestant missions of Jamaica in the years immediately following Britain’s emancipation of laborers in its Caribbean colonies; Sarah Josepha Hale, who parlayed the social influence she had gained as the founder of a seaman’s aid society in Boston into a role as editor of the hugely popular periodical Godey’s Lady’s Book; and Sarah Pogson Smith, who donated the proceeds of her writing to such prominent charitable causes as the New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb and then capitalized on the goodwill this charity work generated among her wealthy friends in New York City, Philadelphia, and Charleston.

Captains of Charity: The Writing and Wages of Postrevolutionary Atlantic Benevolence (Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies)

Eyring, Mary Kathleen

Herman Melville: Modernity and the Material Text (Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies)

In this imaginative book, Katie McGettigan argues that Melville’s novels and poetry demonstrate a sustained engagement with the physical, social, and economic materiality of industrial and commercial forms of print. Further, she shows that this “aesthetics of the material text,” central both to Melville’s stylistic signature and to his innovations in form, allows Melville to explore the production of selfhood, test the limits of narrative authenticity, and question the nature of artistic originality. Combining archival research in print and publishing history with close reading, McGettigan situates Melville’s works alongside advertising materials, magazine articles, trade manuals, and British and American commentary on the literary industry to demonstrate how Melville’s literary practice relies on and aestheticizes the specific conditions of literary production in which he worked. For Melville, the book is a physical object produced by particular technological processes, as well as an entity that manifests social and economic values. His characters carry books, write on them, and even sleep on them; they also imagine, observe, and participate in the buying and selling of books. Melville employs the book’s print, paper, and binding—and its market circulations—to construct literary figures, to shape textual form, and to create irony and ambiguity. Exploring the printed book in Melville’s writings brings neglected sections of his poetry and prose to the fore and invites new readings of familiar passages and images. These readings encourage a reassessment of Melville’s career as shaped by his creative engagements with print, rather than his failures in the literary marketplace. McGettigan demonstrates that a sustained and deliberate imaginative dialogue with the material text is at the core of Melville’s expressive practice and that, for Melville, the printed book served as a site for imagining the problems and possibilities of modernity. Hardcover is un-jacketed.

McGettigan, Katie

In this imaginative book, Katie McGettigan argues that Melville’s novels and poetry demonstrate a sustained engagement with the physical, social, and economic materiality of industrial and commercial forms of print. Further, she shows that this “aesthetics of the material text,” central both to Melville’s stylistic signature and to his innovations in form, allows Melville to explore the production of selfhood, test the limits of narrative authenticity, and question the nature of artistic originality. Combining archival research in print and publishing history with close reading, McGettigan situates Melville’s works alongside advertising materials, magazine articles, trade manuals, and British and American commentary on the literary industry to demonstrate how Melville’s literary practice relies on and aestheticizes the specific conditions of literary production in which he worked. For Melville, the book is a physical object produced by particular technological processes, as well as an entity that manifests social and economic values. His characters carry books, write on them, and even sleep on them; they also imagine, observe, and participate in the buying and selling of books. Melville employs the book’s print, paper, and binding—and its market circulations—to construct literary figures, to shape textual form, and to create irony and ambiguity.Exploring the printed book in Melville’s writings brings neglected sections of his poetry and prose to the fore and invites new readings of familiar passages and images. These readings encourage a reassessment of Melville’s career as shaped by his creative engagements with print, rather than his failures in the literary marketplace. McGettigan demonstrates that a sustained and deliberate imaginative dialogue with the material text is at the core of Melville’s expressive practice and that, for Melville, the printed book served as a site for imagining the problems and possibilities of modernity.

The Politics of Love: Queer Heterosexuality in Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies)

What would love be if heterosexual couples were no longer assigned gender and sexual norms?Maxime Foerster examines the “heterosexual trouble” between men and women in nineteenth-century French Romantic and Decadent literature. Key works by authors ranging from George Sand to Charles Baudelaire persistently demonstrate that heterosexuality did not work: these authors, and many others, investigated the struggle that men and women alike waged against patriarchal norms. Whereas Romantic fiction dedicated itself to the reinvention of love, Decadence promoted sexual and gender deviance.In expertly evaluating the discord afflicting fictional heterosexual couples, male and female dandies, and doctors and their female patients, Foerster shows the crucial role that literature played in the fashioning of alternative identities. A concluding look at Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu traces the legacy of heterosexual trouble in the twentieth century.Hardcover is un-jacketed.

Foerster, Maxime

What would love be if heterosexual couples were no longer assigned gender and sexual norms? Maxime Foerster examines the “heterosexual trouble” between men and women in nineteenth-century French Romantic and Decadent literature. Key works by authors ranging from George Sand to Charles Baudelaire persistently demonstrate that heterosexuality did not work: these authors, and many others, investigated the struggle that men and women alike waged against patriarchal norms. Whereas Romantic fiction dedicated itself to the reinvention of love, Decadence promoted sexual and gender deviance. In expertly evaluating the discord afflicting fictional heterosexual couples, male and female dandies, and doctors and their female patients, Foerster shows the crucial role that literature played in the fashioning of alternative identities. A concluding look at Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu traces the legacy of heterosexual trouble in the twentieth century. Hardcover is un-jacketed.

Few people think of a rich Black heritage when they think of New England. In the pioneering book Black Portsmouth, Mark J. Sammons and Valerie Cunningham celebrate it, guiding the reader through more than three centuries of New England and Portsmouth social, political, economic, and cultural history as well as scores of personal and site-specific stories. Here, we meet such Africans as the "likely negro boys and girls from Gambia," who debarked at Portsmouth from a slave ship in 1758, and Prince Whipple, who fought in the American Revolution. We learn about their descendants, including the performer Richard Potter and John Tate of the People’s Baptist Church, who overcame the tragedies and challenges of their ancestors’ enslavement and subsequent marginalization to build communities and families, found institutions, and contribute to their city, region, state, and nation in many capacities. Individual entries speak to broader issues—the anti-slavery movement, American religion, and foodways, for example. We also learn about the extant historical sites important to Black Portsmouth—including the surprise revelation of an African burial ground in October 2003—as well as the extraordinary efforts being made to preserve remnants of the city’s early Black heritage.

Black Portsmouth: Three Centuries of African-American Heritage (Revisiting New England)

History

Sammons, Mark J.

Cunningham, Valerie

Americas

Governor John Wentworth & the American Revolution: The English Connection

John Wentworth, the last royal governor of New Hampshire, is generally agreed to have been an able, honest, and forthright leader. Given his strong personal and business ties to the colony, historians and scholars have long puzzled over why, when the American Revolution came, Wentworth broke with his family and native land to become a loyalist. Paul W. Wilderson explores this question in an engaging and readable narrative of Wentworth's life and career that challenges traditional assumptions about loyalists. Probably no governor in North America took more genuine interest or greater pride in his colony than John Wentworth. His roots were five generations deep in New Hampshire soil. As governor, he was deeply troubled by the growing rift between the colonies and Great Britain. From 1767, when he became governor, to 1775, when he left, Wentworth never agreed with colonial policies handed down at Whitehall and did not view himself as a loyalist. Why then did he abandon New Hampshire in support of British authority and imperial policies? To answer that question, Wilderson analyzes the special connection Wentworth developed with England through his distant relative, the Marquis of Rockingham. Since Wentworth had worked closely with Rockingham, then head of the British government, to repeal the Stamp Act, he believed that a compromise with the colonies was possible. Blinded to the reality that war was inevitable and the split between Britain and American irreconcilable, Wilderson argues, Wentworth left New Hampshire in 1775 fully expecting to return to his native land.

Biographies & Memoirs

Wilderson, Wilderson

Historical

In nineteen finely honed, deftly realized short stories, Rebecca Rule crafts with gentle wit and striking clarity a conglomeration of sometimes ragtag but always appealing small-town denizens, each of whom squares off against a nemesis of a singular sort. With an eye for the signature detail, an ear for the rhythms of regional speech, and a strong feel for the nuances of rural culture, Rule maintains a fine balance between humor and pathos that prompted National Book Award winner Thomas Williams to comment, "Cold honesty gleams from every careful sentence." Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Rule captures the essence of small-town New England life as she paints with a sure hand the fallings-out and friendships, the trials and triumphs of the New England microcosm. In "Yankee Curse," elderly Miranda knits placidly at a town meeting, pondering an amazing string of unspoken invective against an enemy but stopping short at "a curse she would never levy, not even on Mort Wallace: to live too long." In "Minna Runs for Selectman," a middle-aged woman's battlefield is "the strange, incestuous politics of this eccentric little town" but her real opponent is her own insecurity. In "Jim's Boat" a young couple wages a silent struggle over priorities in their marriage; in "Fishing with George" a small girl worries that "there's a hole in our family that gets bigger every time" her parents argue; and in the title story a mother copes with a hated neighbor through a sculpture that "makes her laugh the kind of laugh that doesn't end in a sob." Children and grandmothers, trappers and college professors, lifetime Yankees or transplanted Flatlanders: each finds the truth in Rule's observation that "revenge takes many forms -- some of which can heal."

The Best Revenge: Short Stories (Hardscrabble Books–Fiction of New England)

Rule, Rebecca

Humor & Satire

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the University of New Hampshire Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by University of New Hampshire Press

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the University of New Hampshire Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Wharton's New England: Seven Stories and Ethan Frome (Hardscrabble Classics)

Transatlantic Conversations: Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Encounters with Italy and the Atlantic World (Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies)

Captains of Charity: The Writing and Wages of Postrevolutionary Atlantic Benevolence (Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies)

Herman Melville: Modernity and the Material Text (Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies)

Herman Melville: Modernity and the Material Text (Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies)

The Politics of Love: Queer Heterosexuality in Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies)

The Politics of Love: Queer Heterosexuality in Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies)

Black Portsmouth: Three Centuries of African-American Heritage (Revisiting New England)

Governor John Wentworth & the American Revolution: The English Connection

The Best Revenge: Short Stories (Hardscrabble Books–Fiction of New England)