Signet Classics: The Age of Innocence

Author: Edith Wharton

Mass Market Paperback: 336 pages

Publisher: Signet; Reissue edition (March 4 2008)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0451530888

ISBN-13: 978-0451530882

Product Dimensions: 10.5 x 2.2 x 17.1 cm

Shipping Weight: 181 g

内容简介

《纯真年代》是美国女作家伊迪丝·华顿创作的长篇小说，也是其代表作。故事的主要情节发生在19世纪70年代末80年代初的纽约，讲述的是青年纽兰·阿彻尔与两位女性梅·韦兰和她的表姐埃伦·奥兰斯卡伯爵夫人之间无法抉择的故事。

《纯真年代》中，作家从自己亲身经历与熟悉的环境中提炼素材，塑造人物，将作品题材根置于深厚的现实土壤之中。尤其通过博福特命运浮沉这一线索与主人公爱情悲剧的主线相互映衬，使一个看似寻常的爱情故事具备了深刻的社会现实意义。在人物塑造方面，作家淡化人物社会行为、着力表现人物内心世界的尝试无疑是对现实主义创作手法的发展。该作获得1921年美国普利策文学奖。

Edith Wharton’s masterpiece brings to life the grandeur and hypocrisy of a gilded age. Set among the very rich in 1870s New York, it tells the story of Newland Archer, a young lawyer engaged to marry virginal socialite May Welland, when he meets her cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, a woman unbound by convention and surrounded by scandal. As all three are drawn into a love triangle filled with sensuality, subtlety, and betrayal, Archer faces a harrowing choice between happiness and the social code that has ruled his life. 

The resulting tale of thwarted love is filled with irony and surprise, struggle and acceptance. Recipient of the first Pulitzer Prize for fiction ever awarded to a woman, this great novel paints a timeless portrait of “society” still unmatched in American literature—an arbitrary, capricious social elite that professes inviolable standards but readily abandons them for greed and desire.