The Ethnography of Manners

This book examines fiction and ethnography as related forms for analysing 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’.

• Expands the scope of traditional literary criticism by combining literary interpretation with analysis of ethnographic writing • Addresses topics previously excluded from studies of these novelists, such as race in Hawthorne’s fiction, or Wharton’s fiction as museum • Should attract readers in popular topics such as American new historicism, ethnography and anthropological theories, and the controversial history of ‘culture’

Acknowledgements; 1. The equivocation of culture; 2. Nathaniel Hawthorne and the fetish of race; 3. The discipline of manners; 4. Henry James and magical property; 5. Edith Wharton and the alienation of divorce; Notes; Index.