Edith Wharton was one of the United States’ first truly global writers. Many of the characters in her most beloved novels and stories—Ellen Olenska, Lilli Estradina, Undine Spragg, and many others—are citizens of the world whose paths take them between various international locales and whose identities become a pastiche of their global experiences. Wharton herself traveled prolifically and wrote about various cultures and locations in her war reporting and travel literature. She has likewise served as inspiration for literary realists across the world, creating a global literary sensibility that can be tracked through critical interpretation. Panelists will address lesser-studied Wharton works like In Morrocco and The Children to track how Wharton reveals the ways in which global capitalism can undermine social connections and fuller lives for those whose devotion to work permeates their identity to the point of becoming indistinguishable from their body and actions. She also portrays national and global integration as, paradoxically, a form of disintegration: as upwardly mobile “Invaders” in better-known works like the aptly-initialed Undine Spragg of Apex bring the customs of “Main Street” both to New York and to Europe, they flatten the “nicely shaded degrees of culture and conduct” that furnish the primary subject of Wharton’s fiction. Wharton may be an early and pessimistic theorist of what Claude Lévi-Strauss called “entropology”: suggesting that the homogenization wrought by cultural exchange will destroy the very diversity and richness of “customs of the country” that made such exchange desirable in the first place. Drawing on the MLA’s theme of “Family Resemblances,” panelists will also consider how Wharton imagines cross-cultural kinship or connection, how the global impacts family bonds in her work, and what ties her style to surprising literary relatives.