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Thresholds Of Curating: Literary Space And Material Culture In The Works Of Harriet Prescott Spofford, Edith Wharton, Isabella Stewart Gardner, And Willa Cather 1870-1920, Lindsay N. Andrews

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation explores the polycentric intersections between material and literary culture in four case studies spanning 1870-1920. Harriet Prescott Spofford, Edith Wharton, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Willa Cather are four women whose work reflects a capacity to defy the genre-specific boundaries for which they are canonically renown. Harriet Prescott Spofford was an important contributor to the interior design movement in the early Gilded Age following challenges to finding publication resources for her fiction within a male-dominated publishing community. Edith Wharton’s ties to material culture are well known, but less attention is granted to the ways in which her own expertise …