https://www.ariellezibrak.com/about daily 1.0 2026-05-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/599c33be-e9ff-4db0-88d2-1856b81d6247/IMG_6625.jpg About - Arielle Zibrak is the author of two books, Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures (New York University Press, 2021) and Writing Against Reform: Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024); as well as the editor of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Twelve Stories by American Women, a more inclusive update to their Four Stories volume, from Penguin Classics in 2025. Her streaming series,“A Literary Tour of the United States,” was released July 2025 by the Great Courses Plus platform. She lives in Laramie, where she is Professor of English at the University of Wyoming. Her current book project, Wishing Ourselves Well: A History of Women’s Healing in the United States from New Thought to Can-Do Feminism, is forthcoming from Liveright/Norton. Representation: Ayla Zuraw-Friedland at the Frances Goldin Agency https://www.ariellezibrak.com/media daily 0.75 2026-05-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/8d76807a-87eb-4785-b0ab-438398f76587/The+Novel+and+Reproductive+Labor_0.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/74fac4ae-038f-4389-9e41-2e1731cc4df8/willa.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/833e4508-ffae-4944-8633-7a7681193daf/higher+ed.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/e5bbddf2-b7d6-476f-9efa-2e55d8298999/bookriot.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/fd3220a0-61bd-4b77-bf00-85e13d0c0b32/nytimes.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1620664982376-L2CRPBKV3ZIMVIHSE2UT/pw.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/92ed1b27-7267-4220-b0f2-eced51f39e8c/nytimes.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/5f7ff4b5-b0e1-40ca-bd46-7e470b532bf8/Wondrium_logo+%281%29.jpg Community + Press - Wondrium Pilots: Edith Wharton’s Gilded Age New York Join Dr. Arielle Zibrak, Associate Professor of English at the University of Wyoming, to take a deep dive into who Edith Wharton was and how she came to be such a popular and well-regarded novelist. You’ll see the New York of Wharton’s time: a place of extremes between wealth and poverty, success and misfortune, hopeful optimism and bitter realities. You’ll gain an appreciation of the complex history of New York’s Gilded Age and Wharton’s relationship to its culture as both a participant and a critic. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/4cda6174-a415-49ed-8d0d-66be5d83f36d/wichita.jpeg Community + Press - Read. Return. Repeat. Podcast for Wichita Public Library Opening Season 3 of the podcast, co-hosts Sara Dixon and Daniel Pewewardy talk with Arielle Zibrak, Associate Professor of English and Gender & Women's Studies at the University of Wyoming to discuss the topic of Category 4: Guilty Pleasures. Zibrak, who is also author of the book Avidly Reads: Guilty Pleasures, discusses the concept of shame and media consumption and why we should never feel bad about the things we love. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/e8b80618-ded2-4956-844b-64d4d3988af7/img_LG_EWR.jpeg Community + Press - Guilty Pleasures by Arielle Zibrak (review) Guilty Pleasures brilliantly thematizes and embodies the need to revise the rigid boundaries of scholarly conversation. Hailing from the author's reflection on her own culture of reading femme fictions as a rite of passage into a world of "guilty pleasures"—such as romance novels, romantic comedies, and popular, female-centered television shows—Guilty Pleasures deftly weaves the nineteenth century with gender studies, cultural critique, and affect theory. With a candid, conversational style, the book bridges academic and popular writing in a way that engages the reader to do the same, broaching such important questions as the nature of pleasure, the experience of guilt, and structures of love, sex, and gender. In what follows, Sarah Danielle Allison (Loyola University), Rita Dashwood (Edge Hill University), and Melissa Gniadek (University of Toronto) join author Arielle Zibrak (University of Wyoming) in an incisive discussion of Guilty Pleasures https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/19f839e6-b89e-4010-8cc7-44efa18d326b/logo-bookmark.png Community + Press - Bloomsbury Object Lessons: Perfume Book Launch Megan Volpert and an eclectic foursome of erica lewis, Kate Leland, Matt Morris, and Arielle Zibrak read from and respond to PERFUME. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/7b391d2f-b4c0-428b-a608-8680974efe77/2022%2B-%2BMarch%2B8%2B-%2BSSAWW%2BReads%2B%282%29%281%29.png Community + Press - SSAWW Reads Event with Jennifer Putzi and Claudia Stokes The Society for the Study of American Women Writers announces the inaugural event in our series SSAWW Reads: Chats with Authors about Their New Books, featuring Jennifer Putzi and Claudia Stokes talking with Arielle Zibrak about two new titles, focusing on what they can tell us about 19th century women writers. For decades, critics have insisted that great writers are original, independent, and trail-blazing. But are they? Join Jennifer Putzi and Claudia Stokes in conversation with Arielle Zibrak as they reevaluate this idea and discuss their new books about the importance of convention, imitation, homage, and tradition in nineteenth-century American literature. Jennifer Putzi, Professor of English and Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies at William & Mary, has written or edited five books. She is currently working on an edition of the 1868 diary of Frances Rollin Whipper. She’ll be discussing Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry (2021). Claudia Stokes, Professor of English at Trinity U. in San Antonio, is the author of The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American and other works. She and Elizabeth Duquette co-edited Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar. She is currently editing Harriet Beecher Stowe's religious writings. She’ll be discussing Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature (2021). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/edde1481-8e1a-401b-9d08-6cf14f6ce2e5/oil+city.jpeg Community + Press - UW professor’s book exploring ‘guilty pleasures’ lands on international magazine’s annual top-20 list CASPER, Wyo. — A University of Wyoming English associate professor’s latest book of cultural criticism has landed on the international online magazine PopMatters’ 20 Best Books of 2021, the university announced Monday. Arielle Zibrak’s book “Guilty Pleasures,” written for both academic and public audiences, explores how the shame associated with lowbrow media and literature is “a particularly femme phenomenon.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/f97aa34c-8547-43f8-a308-af4ed202f29a/Screen+Shot+2021-12-21+at+11.35.24+AM.png Community + Press - THE BEST BOOKS OF 2021 As is PopMatters‘ ethos throughout our 22 years of publishing, there’s a strong current of feminism electrifying our picks for the Best Books of 2021. This book is for people who wouldn’t dare change the channel if there’s an episode of Susan Harris’ The Golden Girls on. It’s for people who regularly cite the “big mistake, huge” scene in Marshall’s 1990 film, Pretty Woman, to convey their dissatisfactions. Zibrak is writing for people who have had a compact disc of the Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion (Mirkin, 1997) soundtrack ready for spinning in their car at top volume in any emotional emergency. – Read Megan Volpert’s full review here. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/19d74efb-b13e-434a-91dd-01bfda375f77/Screen+Shot+2021-12-19+at+12.23.25+PM.png Community + Press - Bonnets at Dawn Podcast Episode Austen vs. Brontë is a literary thunderdome! Listen each week as Lauren and Hannah compare and contrast the lives, work and fandoms of the Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. We’re wrapping up our mini-series on Sex, Scandal, and Social Climbers with Dr. Arielle Zibrak, who is here to discuss the role of bonnets in 19th century literature, bodice rippers, and guilty pleasures. We also carry on our discussion about race in literature, Taylor Swift, and even get into Jane Austen’s Emma and Keanu Reeves. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/ee2e0896-fa25-416d-a473-670ff2820bf0/University-of-chicago_logo.jpeg Community + Press - Pleasure and Compromise: Feminists Read Culture with Arielle Zibrak and Rachel Greenwald Smith Join four feminist critics in conversation about how they love, hate, and compromise with the culture around us. In an imperfect cultural world, what compromises do we make to honor pleasure? How do the things that give us pleasure compromise our politics—or is it the other way around? Can our compromises, and the sometimes-guilty frisson of making them, become themselves pleasurable? Such questions percolate through two new books: Arielle Zibrak’s Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures and Rachel Greenwald Smith’s On Compromise: Art, Politics, and the Fate of an American Ideal. Potential conversational objects of guilt, compromise, and pleasure include but are not limited to: Axl Rose, “Unchained Melody,” seduction plots, white wine spritzers, Edith Wharton novels, Nancy Meyers movies, 4chan, Taylor Swift, fast food, Doc Martens, Judy Blume, online shopping, Poetry magazine, coalitional politics, and the feminist possibilities of “sing-alongs.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1626818672535-9NY5AADUSCVLRFK1LT46/Screen+Shot+2021-07-20+at+3.59.08+PM.png Community + Press - Shelf Love Podcast Episode Despite Tina Turner's claim that love is "but a second-hand emotion," human beings sure do seem obsessed with the pursuit of romantic love - so much so that we dedicate a lot of our storytelling power to exploring it. Shelf Love explores fictional narratives of romantic love through podcast/written discussions with experts and original research collecting real stories and data from the consumers to understand how these narratives impact us. Arielle joins me to explore just some of the thought-provoking arguments made in her book and coach me on letting myself enjoy imperfect media. It's not a book about romance novels (although they're discussed), but the topic is highly relevant for any media that is coded as "femme," especially stories about love. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1626818530841-4AT09JARHWZZ6IXEFCN4/Screen+Shot+2021-07-20+at+4.01.56+PM.png Community + Press - Smart Podcast / Trashy Books Episode Arielle Zibrak is the author of Guilty Pleasures, a new book in the Avidly Reads series from New York University Press. She’s also a former editor of romance fiction, and a professor of 19th century popular fiction. Her new book – which is terrific – examines the concept of the “guilty pleasures” and seeks to unpack and answer the question, “What is it about ribald romance novels, luxurious interior design, and frothy wedding dresses that often make women feel their desires come with a shadow of shame?” This is one of those conversations that made my brain go all jiffy pop with bunches of ideas. I hope you enjoy it as well! You can find Avidly Reads: Guilty Pleasures wherever you get your books, and I’ve got links in the show notes, too. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1621891245879-E81L3WESX89U1RJZIEHL/la-review-of-books-los-angeles-review-of-WDB7qFS5yab.671x671.jpg Community + Press - Academic Affects: A Conversation on Guilty Pleasures In honor of Zibrak’s book, this conversation brings together three scholars — working in different fields and at different kinds of institutions, with different intellectual formations — to think about the status of “guilty pleasures” in the world of academia now. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1621891060343-GXKQSJ0PTAMXQ9KXX7F8/lithub.png Community + Press - The Concept of the Guilty Pleasure Privileges Productivity Above All Else Excerpt from Guilty Pleasures https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1620664784042-33IMH06J7ETIPQNGB1VU/popmatters.jpeg Community + Press Brunch, Ladies? On Arielle Zibrak’s Guilty Pleasures Arielle Zibrak’s Guilty Pleasures is such a fun and fast conversation that reading it feels like having brunch with a hilarious dear friend. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/7cf48edf-20ac-4d65-ad4d-bed047784c97/alh.png Community + Press ALH Online Review, Series XXIV 1 Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays, ed. Arielle Zibrak Reviewed by Sheila Liming, Champlain College Even as it marks the 100th anniversary of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, this volume reckons with three centuries all at once: the nineteenth, in which Wharton’s novel takes place; the twentieth, in which it was published; and the twenty-first, in which the volume’s contributors find themselves positioned. Arielle Zibrak builds a convincing case for this collusion of eras in her introduction. Wharton’s novel, Zibrak contends, “asks us to see the future through a re-examination of the past” (16). This statement sets the tone for the essays that follow, all of which cast the present moment as a kind of critical scaffolding that supports and displays new, extended insights about Wharton’s most celebrated literary work. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/fa9c3939-5075-4b26-a4a2-2b448bd363c6/the+mount.jpeg Community + Press 100 Years of Innocence: Wharton scholars Arielle Zibrak and Sarah Blackwood in conversation. Moderated by The Mount's Public Programs Director Michelle Daly. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1634313665934-0WNFP5WVX16YTSQBIOAG/Screen+Shot+2021-10-15+at+10.00.57+AM.png Community + Press ARIELLE ZIBRAK: ON AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS, GENDER & SEXUALITY https://www.ariellezibrak.com/invite daily 0.75 2025-06-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/a66656cc-8ea5-43cf-bfd8-020e7195948c/barber+stereograph.jpg Invite https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/4179e3d1-44e9-4d9c-b9a2-ad86e3868f06/colliseum.jpg Invite https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/9d5ea6e3-25fc-45c3-83ae-a86e1bb06f45/stereograph+dive.jpg Invite https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work daily 0.75 2026-02-11 https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/essay-at-the-missouri-review monthly 0.5 2025-11-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/66c70fb9-bda0-4f27-a90e-988af75ee9d1/1968_1_p_4-686x1024.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/75d493c0-6c10-4822-abae-9a47a37aab0b/best.jpg https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/twelve-stories-by-american-women monthly 0.5 2025-06-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1725324685479-M3NGF7TT5RCNIHBUZU6M/C212C22A-0C9F-46E2-BA8E-47112305F24D_1_105_c.jpeg https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/essay-for-the-millions monthly 0.5 2024-11-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/9abf95a0-9a67-4b34-a74a-3351990c282f/Screen+Shot+2023-03-07+at+10.37.14+AM.png https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/thenewyorker monthly 0.5 2024-11-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/46451be0-7d81-43f6-871a-433570016551/Screen+Shot+2023-07-13+at+10.59.09+AM.png https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/writing-for-mcsweeneys monthly 0.5 2023-07-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1634581082868-TB694C7NPPNET8SAXH8J/Screen+Shot+2021-10-18+at+11.52.50+AM.png Work - Humor at McSweeney's - THE UNIVERSITY WILL BE ANSWERING QUESTIONS ABOUT ITS NEW BUDGET PLAN ONLY WITH DIRECT QUOTATIONS FROM GERTRUDE STEIN’S TENDER BUTTONS Q: Has student feedback been sought on these cuts? A: There was a whole collection made. A damp cloth, an oyster, a single mirror, a manikin, a student, a silent star, a single spark, a little movement and the bed is made. This shows the disorder, it does, it shows more likeness than anything else, it shows the single mind that directs an apple. All the coats have a different shape, that does not mean that they differ in color, it means a union between use and exercise and a horse. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612310235812-BQYO472KLVIT3ATIHHKA/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+4.56.58+PM.png Work - Humor at McSweeney's - REASONS YOU MIGHT DIE OF CONSUMPTION IN A 19TH-CENTURY NOVEL, IN ORDER FROM LEAST LIKELY TO MOST LIKELY You fell in love with someone who is richer than you are. You got lost in the moors in the rain. You work in a mill. You are a prostitute. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612310032148-ONCOHJ11ZHGHRCHLACDS/best-classic-novels-620x360.jpg Work - Humor at McSweeney's - SUPER SHORT CLIFFSNOTES FOR ALL CLASSIC NOVELS A. Protagonist dies of alienation. B. Protagonist succumbs to the prison of society. https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/a-literary-tour-of-the-united-states monthly 0.5 2026-01-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/bc860800-6d89-4720-95bc-69ea37ff606b/Screenshot+2025-07-02+at+12.34.15%E2%80%AFPM.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/105cf51a-509a-45f4-b64c-b8579e934d85/Screenshot+2025-07-02+at+12.01.25%E2%80%AFPM.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/7d46c355-4c04-499a-b197-f4490d09651f/Screenshot+2025-07-02+at+1.03.39%E2%80%AFPM.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/931195d2-7939-4a23-b670-935b3bce7929/Screenshot+2025-07-02+at+1.03.50%E2%80%AFPM.png https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/larb-a2m5m monthly 0.5 2021-02-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612302680219-NYEFFU927P40I6OTL0LG/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+2.47.01+PM.png Work - Essays for The Los Angeles Review of Books - The End in the Middle of Nowhere: Report from Wyoming It’s been a long day, and I end it as I have the last several, in the worst of all possible ways — scrolling news stories and scientific research articles, poring over modeling studies and trying to teach myself statistics. A research paper published in the Journal of Autoimmunology last month (which has already been cited thirteen times since then) suggests that the zoonotic origin of COVID-19 is the wet animal market in Wuhan City, China. I text John: “This is how the animals get us in the end. Everything else was just warnings. How are you guys?” No answer. I realize it’s almost 1am where he is. I should go to sleep myself. But I can’t stop seeing the shape of a pattern, in these floating images of a molecule that looks like a planet itself. I marvel anew at how the universe endlessly repeats at different scales, the perfect symmetry of actions and reactions: gravitational pulls, tides, imperceptible waves of movement, contractions of muscles — systole and diastole. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612303025768-EA0QN6XPN7WQY31A2FML/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+2.56.36+PM.png Work - Essays for The Los Angeles Review of Books - Malia’s Tears . . .Malia’s was a hard cry to watch — for me and I am sure for many — because it was a cry that we know intimately: the public-private kind of breakdown that one usually has for the first time in the late teens or early 20s (Malia is 18.) The kind of cry you might have on a bus, listening to music, looking out the window and letting your mind wander, only to realize, after the tears have already come, that you are not invisible to your fellow passengers. It was a cry caught between the loneliness of the window and the humiliation of the aisle. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612302796447-JB1UNURV65J5JSLW4YJ3/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+2.53.05+PM.png Work - Essays for The Los Angeles Review of Books - Seeing Both Sides of the Shield: On Rebecca Harding Davis Whether she should turn out to be the hero of her own life — the Dickensian question that animated so much of late 19th-century literature and thought — was immaterial to Davis. If Emerson is right and “there is properly no history; only biography,” the story of a life that places others at its center might be the biography we need most. Harris channels Davis’s ability to offer us a history that engages the ideas we’ve come to embrace alongside those we’ve come to distance ourselves from, our heroes in conversation with our villains. Davis wrote that “[t]he man who sees both sides of the shield may be right, but he is most uncomfortable”; that discomfort seems a small price to pay for a step in the direction of truth. https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/guiltypleasures-g8gx9 monthly 0.5 2025-11-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612303229361-2JHCUNXFZ64Q87QCVXSO/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+3.00.15+PM.png Work - Avidly Reads: Guilty Pleasures - Avidly Reads: Guilty Pleasures A PopMatters Top-Twenty Book of 2021 What is it about ribald romance novels, luxurious interior design, and frothy wedding dresses that often make women feel their desires come with a shadow of shame? In Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures, Arielle Zibrak considers the specifically pleasurable forms of feminine guilt and desire stimulated by supposedly “lowbrow” aesthetic tendencies. She takes up the overwhelming preoccupation with the experience of being humiliated, dominated, or even abused that has pervaded the stories that make up women’s culture—from eighteenth-century epistolary novels to popular twentieth-century teen magazine features to present-day romantic comedies. In three chapters—“Rough Sex,” “Expensive Sheets,” and “Saying Yes to the Dress”—that mirror the plot structures of feminine fictions themselves, this book tells the story of the desires that only the guiltiest of pleasures evoke. Zibrak reexamines documents of femme culture long dismissed as “trash” to reveal the surprisingly cathartic experiences produced by tales of domination, privilege, and the material trappings of the heteropatriarchy. Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at American culture. With the singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures reclaims women’s experiences for themselves. Praise: “Funny, smart, engrossing. I fell head over heels for this exploration of guilty pleasures. Zibrak writes with both an academic's acute eye for pattern and depth and the intimacy of the very works she explores. I feel like I've been laughing with my best friend in a closet, and I can't wait to give a copy to every single one of my friends. I urge you to read it and give it to your friends, too.” --Barbara O'Neal, bestselling author of When We Believed in Mermaids “Reading Arielle Zibrak’s witty and charming survey of what she calls “femme fiction” offers all pleasure and no guilt. Diving into the complex topic of “guilty pleasures,” she mines low and popular culture for nuggets of wisdom about gender, race, class, fiction and fantasy. You will love this book if you need the encouragement to indulge guilty pleasures. You will love it even more if you make no apologies for those pleasures. Enjoy!” —Jack Halberstam, author of Gaga Feminism and The Queer Art of Failure https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/aoi-6ytej monthly 0.5 2021-02-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612303418808-VM2OW26QUJVNPZDB3EE1/Image+2-2-21+at+9.58+AM.jpeg Work - Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays - Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays Following the publication of The Age of Innocence in 1920, Edith Wharton became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. To mark 100 years since the book's first publication, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays brings together leading scholars to explore cutting-edge critical approaches to Wharton's most popular novel. Re-visiting the text through a wide range of contemporary critical perspectives, this book considers theories of mind and affect, digital humanities and media studies; narrational form; innocence and scandal; and the experience of reading the novel in the late twentieth century as the child of refugees. With an introduction by editor Arielle Zibrak that connects the 1920 novel to the sociocultural climate of 2020, this collection both celebrates and offers stimulating critical insights into this landmark novel of modern American literature. Reviews “Classic literary works maintain their status by speaking to subsequent generations anew. Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920) has been highly regarded since it was first published, appreciated by both scholars and general readers throughout the past century and into the 21st. Few readers of 20th-century novels can resist the sumptuous New York of 1870 that Wharton brings to life or tire of the love triangle between the main characters: Newland Archer, May Welland, and Ellen Olenska. The essays Zibrak brings together offer varied perspectives on this classic tale, some pointing toward criticism to come. Some contributors approach the book in traditional ways. For example, Carol Singley provides a cogent reading of the main characters in the context of American individualism, and Hildegard Hoeller compares the novel to Wharton's bolder collection of novellas, Old New York (1924). Other essayists employ verb-mapping data and analyze Wharton's 'free indirect discourse.' A consideration of an early film adaptation of Wharton's famous novel and a personal essay round out the collection. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.” —CHOICE “Individualism, ambivalence, scandal, and belonging--all of these are associated with Wharton's The Age of Innocence, in this stunning new collection of essays. Zibrak orchestrates a whole new set of innovative readings of the novel--and the 1934 film based on it. These essays treat its modernist affect and narrative style, along with its status as an international novel with France as its focus. In moving from a new digital study of Wharton's verbs to the historical status of psychology before 1920, to the novel's relation to Wharton's "Old New York" novellas and her various plots for Age, this collection soars. It heralds a new energy that will advance Wharton Studies anew.” – Dale M. Bauer, Professor of English, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign “Bringing significant insights to the novel's characterization, narration, modernist and international contexts, gender politics, and 1934 film adaptation, this collection employs digital humanities, transhistorical, and interdisciplinary methodologies in exciting new ways and reintroduces us to the beauty and complexity of The Age of Innocence. These stimulating essays remind us of the enduring importance of Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning work in a new age and inspire further avenues of scholarship.” – Gary Totten, Professor and Chair of English, University of Nevada, Las Vegas https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/avidly-a5326 monthly 0.5 2021-02-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1620664456303-YIJ5FJ9GF88VURQ268OX/Screen+Shot+2021-05-10+at+10.33.42+AM.png Work - Essays for Avidly - Pleasure-y Guilts: The True Meaning of Christmas Movies These bad Christmas movies have always offered a special pleasure for me because I am also a career-minded woman who hasn’t learned the true meaning of Christmas. So I find Holly or Carol or Eve “relatable,” except for the key point that Santa will probably never send me a boyfriend for Christmas because I’m Jewish. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612301097129-SGJNBR0OXCTU7FUKUNLV/practice-pyramid.png Work - Essays for Avidly - On the Mat We’re Briefly Perfect: On Netflix’s “Cheer” There is a moment after a cheer team floats into their pyramid when they hang still in mid-air, creating the impression that time has stopped. Then the pyramid disassembles in much the same way it was built; the tape could be running forwards or back. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612301506533-E8AM5O2Q821PHM5SMEYS/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+2.31.32+PM.png Work - Essays for Avidly - Dancing at Lizzo’s Wedding I recently, unexpectedly, almost died. And then after that, I had to sit around in some of the worst pain I’ve known, thinking, as one does. A lot of what I was thinking about was the video for the Lizzo song “Truth Hurts,” which I’d been watching over and over prior to the almost-death incident. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612301757135-F6JH7WU1GSUA25GZSOFZ/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+2.35.26+PM.png Work - Essays for Avidly - Sexy Beasts The ubiquitous trope of hidden identity within the context of romantic encounters is a G-rated rape fantasy wherein what matters is the passion of the pursuer and what is erased is the subjectivity of the pursued. (You can’t consent to an encounter when you’ve been misled about who you’re encountering.) Even when the gender roles are reversed, the position on consent remains the same. It’s easier, when you’re a teenager especially, to exercise sexual desire when the recipient remains anonymous, hence the teenage sexual obsession with unknowable celebrities. There are fewer feelings to deal with when all of the feelings are yours. But when we transpose these benign tendencies into actual sexual encounters, the results are disturbing. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612301961711-ZUKDXYGYTF72TDKV9AWB/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+2.39.09+PM.png Work - Essays for Avidly - On Amish Time Awhile ago, having just moved to Ohio from the east coast, I decided to spend New Year’s Eve with the Amish. Well, not really with the Amish but in the place where the Amish live: Amish country, the second largest tourist attraction in Ohio according to the brochures (1). The Amish don’t celebrate the new year however, nor do they celebrate Christmas on December twenty fifth. They celebrate “Old Christmas,” which is later, in January, and this seems to characterize a lot of what the Amish do: it’s not what the English do. (“English” is the adjective for the non-Amish. “Englisher” is the noun.) They’re on a different schedule. It’s hard not to romanticize the Amish. Their food is delicious. They wear charming outfits (The bonnets! The beards! The wide-placket shirts!) and they ride around in black, horse-drawn buggies with big wagon wheels that harken back to a simpler time. That’s another thing the tourism brochures say again and again and it’s sort of true. https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/baffler4d8cr monthly 0.5 2024-11-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612302127444-OUKS22V5RB40EO9F4EH5/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+2.41.56+PM.png Work - Essays for The Baffler - Big-League Bluster (co-authored with Marissa Gemma) THERE’S AN OLD JOKE about Soviet Russia that you might have heard, where you reverse the two parts of a sentence: “In America, you break law. In Soviet Russia, law breaks you.” The joke is an example of chiasmus, a rhetorical form that repeats words or clauses in transposed order—but this particular version has a name: the “Russian Reversal.” In the United States, the Russian Reversal flourished during the Cold War. Bob Hope, for example, told a form of it at the 1958 Oscars, reminding his audience that though there was a television in his Moscow hotel room, “it watches you.” The comedian Yakov Smirnoff popularized it in the 1980s, hawking Miller Lite with the slogan “In Russia, Party always finds you.” It’s easy to see how the Russian Reversal and Cold War–era Soviet politics relate: the joke turns a subject into an object—something, or, more tellingly, someone, who does not act but is acted upon. The individual becomes subordinate to the agency of some abstract force—the law, say, or the media, or the social order. The politics of democracy versus communism, neatly distilled into rhetorical form. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612302292865-TT72PLZMPXLG3I1W1I1A/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+2.44.37+PM.png Work - Essays for The Baffler - The Trump Train Is Actually a Trump Plane Much has been written and filmed on the allure and narratives of the American road, but far less on American air travel. Perhaps this is because the road represents the America we’d like to think we inhabit: patriotic, free, individualistic, and largely democratic; whereas the reality of contemporary air travel may be closer to the America in which we actually live: global, uncomfortably communal, highly regulated, and intensely class-stratified. https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/toast-3t2nt monthly 0.5 2026-02-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612308983007-PSY3T1UUBO4L4AZJA65Z/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+4.36.09+PM.png Work - Humor at The Toast - How To Tell If You Are In A Henry James Novel You have a burning longing for someone that, if acted upon, would violate every ideal upon which you’ve meticulously built your fraught existence. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612309385005-QDS1OQDKN09PN3JTS8PS/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+4.42.37+PM.png Work - Humor at The Toast - “A Second Life”: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Pleasures of Misogyny Then the absolute worst thing ever to have happened in fiction happens. Practically-dead-already Esther has to live with and care for the horse-ape who raped her because he’s still her husband. And John & co. just go on and on about how great of her this is. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/1612309193702-RP093FFMDMBFBS9ZE67T/Screen+Shot+2021-02-02+at+4.39.42+PM.png Work - Humor at The Toast - Edith Wharton Reviews the Starbucks Located at Her Childhood Home on West 23rd Street Mr. Schultz’s grasping initiation into the New York scene was a large, garish shop in the wasteland beyond Amsterdam Avenue at Eighty-Seventh Street and Broadway in 1994. Since that time, his shops have increasingly begun to migrate downtown, encroaching on “the reservation” where the last good families have already been entirely bought out by University tycoons. It was, perhaps, merely a matter of time before one of these co-engines driving the new New York colonized the modest sandstone townhome on Twenty-Third Street where my parents, George Frederic and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, established themselves and produced three children: Frederic, Henry, and Pussy. (Such was my somewhat unfortunate nickname.) https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/recentscholarship monthly 0.5 2024-11-16 https://www.ariellezibrak.com/work/writing-against-reform-aesthetic-realism-in-the-progressive-era monthly 0.5 2025-12-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/601980317d52c0320916b199/b7994a90-ca86-4a73-b5e0-bc18ef98ec7f/Zibrak_cover_final.jpg Work - Writing Against Reform: Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era - Writing Against Reform: Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era Throughout the Progressive Era, reform literature became a central feature of the American literary landscape. Works like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wall-Paper," and Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives topped bestseller lists and jolted middle-class readers into action. While realism and social reform have a long-established relationship, prominent writers of the period such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, James Weldon Johnson, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Kate Chopin resisted explicit political rhetoric in their own works and critiqued reform aesthetics, which too often rang hollow. Examining the critique of reform aesthetics within the tradition of American realist literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Writing against Reform promises to change the way we think about the fiction of this period and many of America's leading writers. SELECTED PRAISE: “Zibrak has written a book that does and is what it sets out to prove, an artfully written book whose implications go well beyond its focus on literature. It too is a call to action to academic writers to not just write insular criticism but scholarship that is engaging, affecting, and purposeful.” Mark Noonan, Modern Fiction Studies “Writing against Reform will swiftly become required reading for scholars of American realism and of US literary studies more broadly. The book also offers exciting avenues of inquiry for students and scholars beyond these fields in the way it models a critical orientation to literature that goes beyond easy binary oppositions that see art as either “liberatory or oppressive” or “reflective of progressive or conservative ideologies” (20). Through her insightful and sustained close readings and careful attentiveness to the politics of history, Zibrak models how to make literature itself a resource for thinking.” Laura Fisher, The Edith Wharton Review “Nearly always incorporating an analysis of visual art alongside her appraisals of different literary realisms, Zibrak profoundly contributes to the field by compelling us to reevaluate our understanding of politics in turn-of-the-century fiction . . . the book teems with revelatory readings that should inform how we teach and study the authors it covers going forward.” John Funchion, The Henry James Review “Writing against Reform is an engagingly written and persuasively argued piece of scholarship that is a pleasure to read. This is the work of a scholar widely and comfortably knowledgeable in her field of study, and a model of how scholarship should be done: deeply researched, coherently reasoned, and always eloquent.” María Carla Sánchez, author of Reforming the World: Social Activism and the Problem of Fiction in Nineteenth-Century America “An engrossing and compelling study, Writing against Reform uses an impressive range of references and thorough understanding of publishing and social contexts to offer a convincing argument that is as satisfying as it is provocative.” Keith Newlin, author of Hamlin Garland: A Life '“Zibrak's ‘aesthetic realists’ opposed the co-optation of art forms by the new social sciences and disengagement from historical-cultural formalist traditions that gave art meaning beyond its own era. Their thoughtful considerations of social issues were subtler, with a view to broader historical circumstances rather than just specific contemporary events or legislation. A probing and convincing evaluation. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended.” A. E. Krulikowski, Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries