Thesis (M.A.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Arts - Department of English

The thesis aims at examining the social structures and their influence on the individuals in the second half of the Nineteenth century and the early Twentieth century in America. This transitional period was confused between the desperate attempts of holding on to the old values and sense of social duty against the overflowing tides of industrialization, rising modernism and the new money. It marks a severely oppressive era for American people. In order to highlight the aforementioned dialectical relation between society and the individual, two exemplary novels by the writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937) namely, The Age of Innocence (1920) and Ethan Frome(1911)will be examined. Wharton{u2019}s novels are considered alandmark of the turn of the twentieth century American literature for their detailed and piercing views of society, marking the changes occurring to the American society in this era. These two novels in study represent two major sides of American society, the rich urban city of New York and the rural hillsidesof New England. The reading makes use of the tools of New Historicism with a special focus on Foucault{u2019}s concept of Power, since it encompasses a wider scope of social and cultural studies that pertain to serving the main aim of the thesis

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