Extending the Wharton Map Historical Continuity in Edith Wharton’s Osprey Notes (1926)

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Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

Abstract

This essay places Wharton manuscript travel notes of her 1926 Aegean cruise titled Osprey Notes in the context of Wharton’s other travel writing and, simultaneously, maps out some of the intellectual influences that shaped the views represented in it. The theme of historical continuity as an experience to be reconstructed or even as a voice to be listened to appears in earlier travel pieces by Wharton. For Wharton the problem of understanding the past is strongly influenced by work of art historians: especially John Ruskin, Charles Eliot Norton, and Bernard Berenson. The essay explores how historical continuity familiar from other travel texts by Wharton is represented in the Notes, and if or how the influences of Ruskin, Norton, or Berenson are present in the Greek fragments. The aim is to map the traditions of writing and seeing that saturate Wharton’s accounts of classical Greek sites. The article argues that Wharton’s late travel notes are strongly linked to her earliest pieces both thematically through the concern with views, landscapes, ruins and the presence of the past and rhetorically through her method of Ruskinian observation and description.

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How to Cite
Kovács, Ágnes Zsófia. 2019. “Extending the Wharton Map: Historical Continuity in Edith Wharton’s Osprey Notes (1926)”. AMERICANA E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 15 (1). https://iskolakultura.hu/index.php/americanaejournal/article/view/45433.
Section
Essays
Author Biography

Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

Ágnes Zsófia Kovács is associate professor at the Department of American Studies, University of Szeged, Hungary. Her research interests include late 19th-century proto-modern fiction, conversions of literary modernism and postmodernism, popular fiction genres, contemporary multicultural American fiction, theories of narrative, and methods of American Studies. Her current research into travel writing involves re-mapping travel texts by Edith Wharton. She has published two books, The Function of the Imagination in the Writings of Henry James (Mellen, 2006) and Literature in Context (Jate Press, 2010), and she has co-edited Space, Gender and the Gaze (Cambridge Scholars, 2017). She served as guest editor for AMERICANA in 2008 and 2016, with the issues ‘Multiculturalism in American Literature and Art’ and ‘Henry James Appropriated;’ and edited Jon Roberts’ A Life Less Damnable for AMERICANA eBooks in 2013. Email: akovacs@lit.u-szeged.hu