Melanie V. Dawson
Melanie V. Dawson is professor of English at the College of William & Mary. She is the author of Emotional Reinventions: Realist-Era Representations Beyond Sympathy and coeditor of American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity.
American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity
The years between 1880 and 1930 are usually seen as a time in which American writers replaced values and traditions of the Victorian era with wholly new works of modernist literature, and the turn of the century is typically used as a dividing line between the old and the new. Challenging this periodization, this volume argues that this entire time span should instead be studied as a coherent and complex literary field.
- Copyright year: 2018
Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age
Focusing on the works of Edith Wharton and her contemporaries, Melanie Dawson discusses representations of modern American identities past early youth in twentieth-century literature. Dawson sets Wharton’s work at the center of a vital debate about the contested privileges associated with age in contemporary culture.