Pastoral Cosmopolitanism in Edith Wharton's Fiction

Addresses a knowledge gap in Wharton and the environmental humanities, especially recent debates in eco criticism, shedding new light on her narratives.

One of the goals of this book is to demonstrate that while the pastoral seems to portray troubling fractures between the social self and native soil, Wharton is more struck by how these ostensibly divergent cultural categories superimpose and interpenetrate to form an ecocritical palimpsest.