Edith Wharton in the Post-War Literary Marketplace: The Case of the Missing Chapter of In Morocco (1920)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15170/Focus.15.2025.3Keywords:
Edith Wharton, Morocco, publishing, illustrations, French colonialism, North Africa, the Great WarAbstract
Edith Wharton studies have been focusing increasingly on the author’s relationship to her publishers to document her sensitivity to changing requirements of the reading public. For instance, Pavlina Pajot (2020) showed that in the 1920s and 30s Wharton navigated the publishing world by targeting two audiences at the same time. She relied on the technique of publishing short stories and book chapters in middlebrow journals first and then rewriting them for a highbrow audience in more highbrow style for the book version. Drawing upon Pajot’s results, the paper proposes to investigate the literary production process of Wharton’s popular Moroccan travel book In Morocco (1920) which had also been compiled from earlier illustrated articles. The paper surveys the cultural undercurrents of production and publishing: it shows that the book version carries new chapters that had no earlier journal versions and suppresses a journal article which could have been part of the volume; and that the book version rearranges photo illustrations provided by the French colonial administration. The paper claims that the exclusion/inclusion of chapters and the selection and arrangement of illustrations for In Morocco not only relied on a French colonial discourse of Morocco but also catered to requirements of the post-war US literary marketplace.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Ágnes Zsófia Kovács
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