January Tea with TLW
Wednesday 24 January 2024 (5pm UK time; noon NYC)
A Joint Event with the Edith Wharton Society and the Transatlantic Literary Women: Professor Gary Totten on Edith Wharton’s Geographical Imagination
We can’t believe it is nearly 2024, but we are very excited to be beginning the new year with our fourth-running joint event with the Edith Wharton Society to celebrate Wharton’s birthday. Upholding our tradition this year, we are thrilled to be joined by the renowned Wharton scholar, Professor Gary Totten from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who will be giving a talk titled ‘Edith Wharton’s Geographical Imagination: Notes from the Travel Writing’.
At the beginning of Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904), Edith Wharton celebrates what she calls “garden-magic,” a spell that lingers within the consciousness of the traveler returning from Italy. Wharton focuses here on the Italian garden, but she insists that a fuller appreciation for its enchantment requires an understanding of the relationship between the villa, its garden, and the landscape. These synergies of the natural and built environments, and the animating force of such settings for Wharton’s characters, stimulate her fiction and find early and persistent expression in her travel writing: the island biomes of the Aegean, the verdant hills and valleys of Italy and France, and the deserts and oases of Morocco exist in mutually enriching relation to their inhabitants and structures.
Indeed, Wharton’s travel writing showcases the centrality of her geographical, even environmental, imagination to her body of work. In this talk, Gary will reflect on Wharton’s travel narratives to unpack how the combination of her geographical sensibility and mobility as a traveler produces a cultural vision reflecting the privileges of her race and class while also offering insights into women’s travel experiences and compelling moments of engagement with and understanding of the natural world.
Join us to celebrate Edith Wharton’s birthday in style with this fascinating, transatlantic talk. As always, all are welcome. If you’d like to join us, please email: transatlantic.women@gmail.com and we’ll send you a secure Zoom link.
We hope to see you there!
Team TLW: Laura, Chiara, Lindsay, Shelby
#TeawithTLW
Gary Totten is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Editor-in-Chief of the journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. He is the author of African American Travel Narratives from Abroad: Mobility and Cultural Work in the Age of Jim Crow (2015), coeditor of Politics, Identity, and Mobility in Travel Writing (2015), and editor of Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture (2007). His most recent edited book Companion to the Multiethnic Literature of the United States (Wiley-Blackwell) is forthcoming in 2024. He is currently the volume editor for Volume 9: Travel Writings of the series The Complete Works of Edith Wharton, from Oxford UP. His articles on Wharton and other late nineteenth- and twentieth-century US fiction and travel writers have appeared in journals and essay collections.
Transatlantic Literary Women 