Edith Wharton’s Travel Writing: The Making of a Connoisseur

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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.