The vice of reading by Edith Wharton, with notes.
New version of The vice of reading by Edith Wharton, enriched with explicative notes by Loredana de Michelis.
This is the famous article, written in 1903 for The North American Review, in which Edith Wharton describes literature as a “process of transposition and selection” carried out by the writer, through which books are transformed into maps rich in “by-paths and cross-cuts” and “growing things that strike root and intertwine branches”.
To demonstrate such a theory, in this brief essay she manages to link together multiple sources and to hide an extraordinary number of allusions within the text, ranging from the Bible to Shakespeare, from the Book of Mormon to Verlaine, Goethe, George Eliot, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and many others. Not even good-natured jibes at famous friends and some pedantic critics are missing.
The sixteen notes inserted in this version of “The vice of reading” by Edith Wharton reveal for the first time the meaning of some of the allusions contained within. However, Edith Wharton’s challenge still remains open today for those who wish to continue searching for new, not yet unidentified ones.
“The vice of reading” is an adventurous and extraordinary journey that can prove – even to readers in the digital age – how interactive culture has always been, even in the past, the foundation of artistic and cognitive development.
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Loredana de Michelis is an italian writer and an English to Italian translator. For enquires: loridemi@gmail.com
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