Abstract
How might Edith Wharton’s thoughts about readers and reading speak to anxieties about the fate of reading in our own moment? This short article places Wharton in conversation with the contemporary thinker Maryanne Wolf, identifying some overlap and also some disagreement in their views about technology’s effects on attention, imagination, and reading. Wharton’s critical representations of readers, the essay suggests, offer a salutary reminder that fears about bad reading have long attended advances in technology; and Wolf’s hortatory account of the virtues and benefits of reading finds a proleptic critique in Wharton’s unabashed celebration of irony and pleasure.
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2024
The Pennsylvania State University
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