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   akannan Teacher
   Middle School

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   Wharton is writing during the late 19th and early 20th century.  Her major influences were the realists and the post modern thinkers of Europe.  For example, she reads Flaubert from France, a realist writer who paid meticulous attention to daily life and the emotions that envelop it.  She also read the philosophy of Dostoyevsky and Nietszche, thinkers that questioned the notion of God and the major notions of ethics and ethical behavior.  She is writing at the emergence of the First World War, and the nihilist intellectual philosophy that accompanied it.  This philosophy stressed that human beings "invent" values that are not transcendent, but actually pretend to comform to create a social veneer of acceptance.  In her works, Wharton shows the profound influence that such ideas had on her thinking and her writing.

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   Posted by akannan on Monday July 13, 2009 at 4:40 PM