Edith Wharton was not only the author of novels and short stories but also of drama, poetry, autobiography, interior decoration, and travel writing. This study focuses on Whartons symbolic representations of architecture in her travel writings. It shows how a network of allusions to travel writing and art history books influenced Whartons representations of architectural and natural spaces. The book demonstrates Whartons complex relationship to works of art historians (John Ruskin, Émile Mâle, Arthur C. Porter) and travel authors (Wolfgang Goethe, Henry Adams, Henry James) in the trajectory of her travel writing. Kovács surveys how the acknowledgment of Whartons sources sheds light both on the authors model of aesthetic understanding and scenic architectural descriptions, and how the shock of the Great War changed Whartons travel destinations but not her symbolic view of architecture as a mediator of things past. Whartons symbolic representations of architecture provide a new key to her travel writings.
Acknowledgements
List of illustrations
Introduction
1. Whartons view of cultural continuity in Italian Villas (1904) and Their
Gardens (1905)
Influences and editorial interventions
Villas and tradition
Whartons definition of villa
Renaissance tour
Baroque tour
Villas and art history
Nature and culture in garden architecture
Manners in garden architecture
Writing the history of art and architecture
2. Uncatalogued treasures: Travels in art history via Edith Whartons Italian
Backgrounds (1905)
Sources and book
The seen and the unseen: John Ruskins Italy
Publication and reception
Whartons visions of Italy: deconventionalized scenes
Foreground and background
Scenes of observation
Fact and fancy in Whartons painterly vision
Whartons backgrounds
3. Historical Continuity in A Motor-Flight Through France (1908)
Influences, editing and illustrations, contemporary reviews
Historical continuity in space
Continuity in landscape and architecture
Renovations contra ruins
Cathedrals as symbols: a sentimental model of appreciating continuity
The stakes of historical understanding in Wharton
4. The war of images: Edith Whartons architectural reports of war in
Fighting France (1915)
Antecedents, articles to book, early reviews
Visions of war and cultural destruction in Fighting France
The role of art history and propaganda in Whartons language of war
5. A Motor-Flight Through North Africa: The Miracle of Morocco
Composition, publication, contemporary reception
Whartons Moroccan Orient: history, dreams, women
Facts and dreams of the Moroccan past
Moroccan harems
Whartons architectural vision in her colonial war reports
6. Edith Whartons quest for historical continuity in the Aegean
Antecedents and publication history: Homer, Goethe, and Ruskin in the
typescript
Observing architecture in The Cruise of the Vanadis
Architectural vision in the Osprey Notes
Absence and presence of the past in Athens and Crete
7. Edith Whartons travel fragments about Spain
Where the fragments come from: Whartons readings in art history
St. Jamess Way: Whartons Spanish cathedral trail in the Spain Diary,
Back to Compostela and A Motor-Flight Through Spain
Architectural vision in A Motor-Flight Through Spain
Conclusion
Index
Ágnes Zsófia Kovács is Associate Professor at the Department of American Studies, University of Szeged, Hungary. Her research interests include late-nineteenth-century proto-modern fiction, conversions of literary modernisms, popular fiction genres, and contemporary multicultural American fiction. Her current research into travel writing involves remapping travel texts by Edith Wharton. She has published two books, The Function of the Imagination in the Writings of Henry James: The Production of a Civilized Experience (2006) and Literature in Context (2010), co-edited Space, Gender and the Gaze (2017), and edited Edith Whartons Osprey Notes (2021). She sits on the editorial boards of Americana E-Journal and TNTeF E-Journal, Szeged; and Acta Philologica, Cluj (RO).
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