The Memory of Architecture in Edith Wharton’s Travel Writings

Ágnes Zsófia Kovács is an 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).

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