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In this first full-length study of Wharton and “the built environment,” Benert (DeSales Univ.) discusses such well-known novels as The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence, along with Wharton’s less-familiar nonfiction volumes on architecture and travel, including her first book, The Decoration of Houses (1897), written in collaboration with Boston architect Ogden Codman, Jr. Benert includes reproductions of photographs of several sites in the US and Europe to underscore Wharton’s fascination with constructed exteriors and interiors, from French cathedrals and Italian villas to the elaborate gardens at The Mount, her home in Lenox, MA. According to Benert, Wharton’s “active identification” with architecture, anthropology, and literary realism suggests “the attempt to free herself from the prevailing canons of upper-class femininity that made authentic selfhood difficult.” The “imprisoning structures” in her fiction, writes Benert, “harked back to Hawthorne and forward to Michel Foucault” and William Faulkner. The author argues that Wharton’s horror of tyranny marks her perspective as “steadfastly American,” despite her long residence in France and her love of Latin culture. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.