Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Realm Of The Real: Imitation And Authenticity In Edith Wharton's The Custom Of The Country, Brittany Brie Atkinson

Theses and Dissertations

Edith Wharton's 1913 novel The Custom of the Country reveals a national concern with defining and preserving authenticity in social and cultural life. A study of the novel through the lens of scholarship concerning the modernist obsession with "the real thing," including such seminal texts as Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity, opens up a broad discussion of authenticity and imitation as defined by Wharton's characters. This paper challenges the traditional interpretations of the much-abused term. First, I outline a brief history of the study of authenticity …