The Memory of Architecture in Edith Whartons Travel Writings

It focuses on Wharton's symbolic representations of architecture in her travel writings. It shows how allusions to travel writing and art history influenced her representations of spaces. How the shock of the Great War changed Wharton's travel destinations but not her symbolic view of architecture as a mediator of the past.

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 Wharton's symbolic representations of architecture in her travel writings. It shows how a network of allusions to travel writing and art history books influenced Wharton's representations of architectural and natural spaces. The book demonstrates Wharton's 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 Wharton's sources sheds light both on the author's model of aesthetic understanding and scenic architectural descriptions, and how the shock of the Great War changed Wharton's travel destinations but not her symbolic view of architecture as a mediator of things past. Wharton's symbolic representations of architecture provide a new key to her travel writings.

Autorentext

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 Wharton's Osprey Notes (2021). She sits on the editorial boards of Americana E-Journal and TNTeF E-Journal, Szeged; and Acta Philologica, Cluj (RO).

Klappentext

It focuses on Wharton's symbolic representations of architecture in her travel writings. It shows how allusions to travel writing and art history influenced her representations of spaces. How the shock of the Great War changed Wharton's travel destinations but not her symbolic view of architecture as a mediator of the past.

Inhalt

Acknowledgements

List of illustrations

Introduction

1. Wharton's view of cultural continuity in Italian Villas (1904) and Their Gardens (1905)

Influences and editorial interventions

Villas and tradition

Wharton's 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 Wharton's Italian Backgrounds (1905)

Sources and book

The seen and the unseen: John Ruskin's Italy

Publication and reception

Wharton's visions of Italy: deconventionalized scenes

Foreground and background

Scenes of observation

Fact and fancy in Wharton's painterly vision

Wharton's 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 Wharton's 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 Wharton's language of war

5. A Motor-Flight Through North Africa: The Miracle of Morocco

Composition, publication, contemporary reception

Wharton's Moroccan Orient: history, dreams, women

Facts and dreams of the Moroccan past

Moroccan harems

Wharton's architectural vision in her colonial war reports

6. Edith Wharton's 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 Wharton's travel fragments about Spain

Where the fragments come from: Wharton's readings in art history

St. James's Way: Wharton's 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