Ágnes Zsófia Kovács, The Memory of Architecture in Edith Wharton’s Travel Writings, New York: Routledge, 2025, 226 p.

Abstract

Drawing on a post-theory definition of travel writing as social discourse, Ágnes Zsófia Kovács’s book argues that a close analysis of architectural and natural spaces in Edith Wharton’s travel writing repositions these texts within a larger cultural field shaped by aesthetic, social, and historical conventions and by the institutionalization of early twentieth-century publishing. Most readers today associate Wharton with major novels of manners such as The Age of Innocence (1920) and The House of Mirth (1905), even though, as Kovács notes, Wharton was actually better known during her lifetime for her travel writing. Recent criticism has done much to change this view by broadening the Wharton canon through archival discoveries and the publication of little-known documents. It has also brought an interdisciplinary lens to Wharton’s engagements with ethnography, visual culture, and cultural history—discursive practices that together form the nebulous generic category of her “travel writing.” Kovács’s book is part of this growing body of criticism, as it seeks to complement existing research, including the major book-length study on the topic, Sarah Bird Wright’s Edith Wharton’s Travel Writing (1992) as well as articles by Annette Benert, Nancy Bentley, Emily Orlando, and Gary Totten. It aims to show that an analytical framework combining art-historical and ethnographic perspectives can reveal a more nuanced understanding of Wharton as a reflective thinker concerned with metaphysical questions such as the historical and cultural continuity encoded in her representation of architectural monuments, cultivated spaces, and natural landscapes.