الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 205 |  |  |
| | | from | 205 | | |
Abstract
American fiction teems with journeys. Early travel narratives were mainly concerned with journeys for the sake of exploration. Yet, later on, American novelists have started to tackle journeys for other purposes like the quest for happiness, home-founding, escape or wandering aimlessly. While Edith Wharton (1862-1937) is a famous American travel author, Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) is underestimated. Thus, this thesis compares and contrasts selected travel narratives by these two authors in order to highlight the contributions of both in the field of travel literature. Each pair of novels is chosen according to the purpose of the journey depicted. In the first chapter, the quest for happiness in Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) and Lewis’s The Job (1917) is discussed. The second chapter offers a comparison between the home-founding journey in Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913) and that in Lewis’s Main Street (1920). The escape to Europe in Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920) and Lewis’s Dodsworth (1929) is the focus of chapter three. Moreover, the journeys are also scrutinized on a deeper level. As the protagonists move from one place to another, they go through a psychological journey and make recourse to different self-defense mechanisms to be able to adapt to their societies.
whereas Wharton is mainly concerned with high-class Americans, Lewis portrays middle-class ones. Wharton examines the journeys from a female point of view, while Lewis shows the male one. Wharton does not end her novels happily; on the other hand, Lewis prefers optimistic endings. All in all, both Wharton and Lewis are talented novelists who manage to trace the journeys of Americans – physical and mental – in the early twentieth century.