Edith Wharton is regularly the question or answer on Jeopardy! these days. She's also the heroine of a 2024 murder mystery by Mariah Fredericks. The indie band The Magnetic Fields penned a love-letter to the "masterpiece of catastrophic love" that is Wharton's 1911 Ethan Frome, and a diverse range of voices cite Wharton as an influence or a favorite: Roxane Gay, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Beth Nguyen, and Francis Ford Coppola -- whose adaptation of The Glimpses of the Moon is currently underway. A novel that, in fact, also inspired Tavi Gevinson's 2024 audio series.
One of only a few early twentieth-century American women novelists whose work has never been out of print, Wharton's appeal has long stretched beyond the academy and across demographics, but perhaps never more so than in the twenty-first century. From Juliet Sharp reading The House of Mirth on the original CW network's Gossip Girl in the aughts to Julian Fellowes naming the best dressed couple on HBO's The Gilded Age after George and Bertha Dorset from the same novel, Edith Wharton is enjoying a renaissance across 21st-century popular culture even more pronounced than her 1990s revival. This guaranteed panel sponsored by the Edith Wharton Society invites 15-20 minute presentations that address popular culture's engagement with Wharton's capacious body of work.
Papers might theorize why Wharton's work remains such an enduring feature of the public sphere, how adaptations modernize her works (or don't), how Wharton leverages notions of the popular within her work, Wharton in periodical context, Wharton in film studies, or make a case for the influence of Wharton on popular works not explicitly connected to her oeuvre. While we welcome submissions from established scholars, we especially encourage papers from graduate students and emerging critical voices. Please submit a 250-word abstract and abbreviated CV to Emily Orlando ([email protected]) and Arielle Zibrak ([email protected]) by Jan 3, 2025.