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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.
Bringing together leading voices from across the globe, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton represents state-of-the-art scholarship on the American writer Edith Wharton, once primarily known as a New York novelist. Focusing on Wharton's extensive body of work and renaissance across 21st-century popular culture, chapters consider: - Wharton in the context of queer studies, race studies, whiteness studies, age studies, disability studies, anthropological studies, and economics; - Wharton's achievements in genres for which she deserves to be better known: poetry, drama, the short story, and non-fiction prose; - Comparative studies with Christina Rossetti, Henry James, and Willa Cather; -Th...
'Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism' explores Edith Wharton's relation to the concept of cosmopolitanism, as it extended toward her politics, her aesthetics, and her vision of cultural differences. Essays explore Wharton's cosmopolitan ideas and ideals, influences such as American art historian Charles Eliot Norton; her attitudes toward transatlanticism and globalization;and her art-historical discoveries in Europe.
Keywords for Travel Writing Studies draws on the notion of the ‘keyword’ as initially elaborated by Raymond Williams in his seminal 1976 text Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society to present 100 concepts central to the study of travel writing as a literary form. Each entry in the volume is around 1,000 words, the style more essayistic than encyclopaedic, with contributors reflecting on their chosen keyword from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The emphasis on travelogues and other cultural representations of mobility drawn from a range of national and linguistic traditions ensures that the volume has a comparative dimension; the aim is to give an overview of each term in its historical and theoretical complexity, providing readers with a clear sense of how the selected words are essential to a critical understanding of travel writing. Each entry is complemented by an annotated bibliography of five essential items suggesting further reading.
This book presents the meticulous case studies of three individual houses from different eras, which serve to depict the social, political, and cultural effects that domestic architecture and interior design had on the upper class, the city of Boston, and a national American identity. It takes the reader on a journey to 18th and 19th century Boston and provides insight into the lives of these prominent men and women as seen through the perspective of their homes. It is a novel examination of the cultural significance of domestic architecture and interior design and, because of its story-telling character and extensive attention to detail, it is fascinating for curious readers and cultural historians alike.
Edith Wharton’s The Decoration of Houses (1897), co-written with the architect Ogden Codman Jr., brought transatlantic fame to a writer best known as a chronicler of Gilded Age New York. In their decorating guidebook, Wharton and Codman, who collaborated on the design of the author’s Massachusetts home, The Mount, advocated for simple but classically informed choices that resonate profoundly today. The book crystallizes what Wharton found to be troubling in Americans’ enthusiasm for ostentation at the turn of the twentieth century—the late Victorian equivalent of the modern “McMansion.” This annotated edition includes a comprehensive introduction that provides relevant biographical information on Wharton, as well as her literary work and how her perspectives on homeownership and décor informed her writing. The reproduction of the book’s original illustrations alongside new annotations allows readers to visualize how Wharton’s aesthetic preferences informed her writing, life, and charitable works. Valuable to Wharton scholars as well as students of design, The Decoration of Houses presents a definitive look at the tastes of a literary icon.
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The first thematic series published for American literature, THE WADSWORTH THEMES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE SERIES is currently comprised of 21 themes spanning the time period normally covered in the two-semester American literature survey course--1492 to the present. Each carefully edited booklet centers on a core issue of the period with attention given to the development of key themes. Each thematic booklet offers an introductory contextual essay, a variety of literary perspectives, headnotes and footnotes, along with a variety of visual elements. Martha J. Cutter--a scholar of considerable range and achievement who now teaches at the University of Connecticut--edits the sequence of booklets...
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Re-Invention of the American West : Women's Periodicals and Gendered Geography in the Late Nineteenth-Century United States