Offering a guide through past and present debates about the English curriculum, this book aims to appeal to students and practising teachers.

Offers a lively and accessible guide through past and present debates about the English curriculum which will appeal to students and practising teachers.

Edith Wharton enjoyed a complex relationship with earlymodernism. On the one hand, as a writer committed to the seriousness of novel writing as an art, her love of French literature and her close relationship with Henry James made her open to experiment. Other elements in her circumstances made her resistant to change. She enjoyed enormous success with The House of Mirth, and the public clearly demanded more from her in this style. That novel's naturalism and didactic purpose, Peel argues, conformed to her own belief in the moral purpose of literature, and ultimately Wharton's reading of...