Reassesses American elitisms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century

Brings together the insights of recent Victorianist and Americanist scholarship in order to show how Adams, James, and Wharton engage with liberal thinking about whiteness, democracy, and citizenship.
Locates these authors in disciplinary history, revealing that their critical responses to Bostonian liberalism feed into the ideas that structure the study of US literary history during the twentieth century.
Offers a rich portrait of the Harvard intellectual milieu to which these authors respond, bringing fresh attention to their connections with thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles William Eliot, Charles Eliot Norton, and Barrett Wendell.

Arguing that Henry Adams, Henry James and Edith Wharton articulated their political thought in response to the liberalism that reigned in Boston and, more specifically, at Harvard University, this book shows how each of these authors interrogated that liberalism's arguments for education, democracy and the political duties of the cultivated elite. Coit shows that the works of these authors contributed to a realist critique of a liberal New England idealism that fed into the narrative about 'the genteel tradition', which shaped the study of US literature during the twentieth century.