Edith Wharton's Travel Writing: The Making of a Connoisseur [Hardcover]

The first book-length critical analysis of its kind, Edith Wharton's Travel Writing is an engaging study of Wharton's travel writing as the embodiment of her connoisseurship. Wright reveals how Wharton enacted a new dialectic of tourism by reconstituting what Blake Nevius calls the 'aesthetic spectra' in her travel texts. Wharton abandoned the examples set by American predecessors such as Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who led the 'artless travelers' of her parents' day to lakes, waterfalls, mountains, and ruins echoing sentimental legends and chose to emulate John Ruskin's precise visual observation and Bernard Berenson's scientific methods of appraisal.Preface - Connoisseur, Scholar, Amateur, and Traveler: The Cruise of the Vanadis - From America to Europe: The Decoration of Houses - Edith Wharton and Travel Writing in the Gilded Age: Italian Villas and Their Gardens, Italian Backgrounds - The Travel Texts in the Marketplace - The Belle Epoque: A Motor-Flight Through France - Sauvez, sauvez la France: World War One and Its Aftermath: Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort, French Ways and Their Meaning - Something Veiled and Abstracted: In Morocco - Patterns of Evolution: Reading the Travel Texts - Refracting the Odyssey: Edith Wharton's Travel Writing as the Cultural Capital of Her Fiction - Conclusion - Notes - Selective Bibliography - Index