The ethnography of manners
Subtitle: Hawthorne, James, Wharton
By: Nancy Bentley.
Series: Cambridge studies in American literature and culture ;; 90
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 242
Subjects: Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864 -- Knowledge -- Manners and customs; Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937 -- Knowledge -- Manners and customs; James, Henry, 1843-1916 -- Knowledge -- Manners and customs; American fiction -- History and criticism; Literature and anthropology -- United States; Literature and society -- United States; Manners and customs in literature; Ethnology in literature
Description: This book examines fiction and ethnography as related forms for analyzing and exhibiting social life. Focusing on the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, the study argues that novels and ethnographies collaborated to produce an unstable but powerful master discourse of "culture," a discourse that allowed writers to turn new social energies and fears into particular kinds of authorial expertise.

Crossing a range of institutions (anthropology, literature, museums, law) and texts (novels, ethnographies, travel books, social theory), this study allows fiction to take its place in a web of social practices that categorize, display, and regulate what Wharton calls "the customs of the country."
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 213-236) and index.