The primary focus of this thesis is the New York fiction by the prolific American writer Edith Wharton. The particular works discussed in this thesis are The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence, completed by the collection of four novellas, Old New York, and also a selection of Wharton's short stories set in the city of New York. The main argument of the thesis could be encapsulated to say that Wharton's fiction lacks the individuality of the characters, and the main focus of the texts is on society and how society affects the archetypes of the characters created solely for the purposes of this thesis. It is divided into three intersecting chapters, the first topical chapter concentrating on New York as such and how the Gilded Age influenced the Big Apple. Moreover, Wharton and her own relationship with the city is discussed in this chapter as well, pointing at the fact that she was intimately familiar with the custom and the manners of the upper society of New York, which she later implemented in her fiction. Also, the description of naturalism and determinism are provided as those seem to be the genres most utilized by the author. The next chapter revolves around the notion of archetypes as Claude Lévi-Strauss introduced in his "The Structural Study of Myth," which...
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:nusl.cz/oai:invenio.nusl.cz:448711 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Milotová, Simona |
| Contributors | Roraback, Erik Sherman, Ulmanová, Hana |
| Source Sets | Czech ETDs |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess |
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