Title: Patterns of enclosure
First published: 1997
Description: Edith Wharton's sense of beauty found a visual definition through her sense of ugliness and, in general, through an ambivalent view of reality, composed of an alternation, at times a mingling, of both the beautiful and the ugly. The aim of this study is to show how Edith Wharton's strong sense of beauty was a constant force imposing order and intellectual discipline throughout her life and to argue how it was closely connected to her sense of ugliness both in her fictional and factual world,
Subjects: American literature, literary criticism, aesthetics, architecture, decoration of houses, garden architecture, philosophy.
Places: New York, Italy, France
People: Edith Wharton (1862-1937), Vernon Lee, Bernard Berenson
Time periods: 1862-1937