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Books
Books
2025
2025
Routledge
2010
2010
JATEPress
2006
2006
Mellen Press
The Memory of Architecture on Edith Wharton's Travel Writings. (2025)
The Memory of Architecture on Edith Wharton's Travel Writings. (2025)
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 acknowledgement 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.
New York: Routledge, 2025.
Literature in Context: Reading American Novels. (2010)
Literature in Context: Reading American Novels. (2010)
This book of essays introduces students to major disciplinary and methodological problems of studying American 'literature' today. It discusses changes within the field of American Studies in a set of brief historical surveys and then focuses on recent strategies of reading literature in context. Yet the novels that are analyzed constitute no survey of American literary history. Rather, they provide examples of themes and issues that have been challenging scholars lately and also offer insights into the hermeneutics of literary response.
Szeged: JATE Press - Szegedi Egyetemi Kiadó, 2010.
The Function of the Imagination in the Writings of Henry James: The Production of a Civilized Experience. (2006)
The Function of the Imagination in the Writings of Henry James: The Production of a Civilized Experience. (2006)
The book investigates how Henry James uses the term ‘imagination’ in three different discursive contexts: his critical articles on novelists and literature, his fictional production, and his essays on American culture. The book differentiates the diverse meanings of the term ‘the imagination’ for James in different contexts. It places his novelistic project among American, French, English, and Russian writers of his age. The work offers a case study of the Jamesian ideas with some reference to his contemporary context.
Jamesian imagination is shown to be a part of James’s contextual model of understanding. In his critical articles on other novelists, the imagination is mainly responsible for an active, profound transformation of impressions into a process of experience, and this quality of the imagination is referred to as moral. In the novels, the imagination retains its central role in the process of understanding, but understanding becomes a social affair of more than one person. The morality of the imagination lies in the perceiver’s awareness of others’ versions of understanding and in making his choices as to which one he chooses to accept. In the essays on American culture, the implicit norm of the socially defined moral imagination leads James to pass harsh judgment on Americans he no longer understands. The term ‘the imagination’ is defined cognitively in the critical articles, but in the novels its function becomes a social one: for James the author, the imagination is not so much a faculty of personal experience and knowledge but one of social experience and of a communal production of knowledge. The moral aspect of the imagination becomes social in the novels, too, referring to the choices one makes in relations to others. In the essays on culture, this social ideal of imaginative understanding is applied through a discussion of American manners. The term ‘the imagination’ refers to the imagination of the author-narrator, the character, and the critic as well, and thereby expands to be an aspect of literary communication. In this way, the intellectual project James the critic outlined for himself as a novelist at the crossroads of American, French, and English traditions of the novel has evolved through the changes of his contextual model of understanding. For James the novelist and cultural critic, the project has become an imaginative processing of the moral aspects of social interactions.
Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006.
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