ABSTRACT

This collection of essays explores the hotel as a site of modernity, a space of mobility and transience that shaped the transnational and transcultural modernist activity of the first half of the twentieth century. As a trope for social and cultural mobility, transitory and precarious modes of living, and experiences of personal and political transformation, the hotel space in modernist writing complicates binaries such as public and private, risk and rootedness, and convention and experimentation. It is also a prime location for modernist production and the cross-fertilization of heterogeneous, inter- and trans- literary, cultural, national, and affective modes. The study of the hotel in the work of authors such as E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, Kay Boyle, and Joseph Roth reveals the ways in which the hotel nuances the notions of mobilities, networks, and communities in terms of gender, nation, and class. Whereas Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes, Anaïs Nin, and Denton Welch negotiate affective and bodily states which arise from the alienation experienced at liminal hotel spaces and which lead to new poetics of space, Vicki Baum, Georg Lukács, James Joyce, and Elizabeth Bishop explore the socio-political and cultural conflicts which are manifested in and by the hotel. This volume invites us to think of “hotel modernisms” as situated in or enabled by this dynamic space. Including chapters which traverse the boundaries of nation and class, it regards the hotel as the transcultural space of modernity par excellence.

chapter 1|19 pages

Hotel Trouble

part |61 pages

Hospitalities, Communities

chapter 2|16 pages

“Blank, blond horror”

The Hotel as Medical Facility

chapter 3|16 pages

Hotel Performance and Its Remains

Jean Cocteau and Mary Butts at the Welcome

chapter 5|14 pages

“No longer a hotel”

Colonial Decadence in Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet

part |59 pages

Rooms, Views

chapter 6|15 pages

Landslide at the Pension Bertolini

Anti-tourism versus Groundless Transculturalism in E. M. Forster's A Room with a View

chapter 7|14 pages

H.D.'s Hotel Visions

chapter 8|13 pages

Carnivorous Flowers and Poisoned Webs

Surrealist Experimentation in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood and Anaïs Nin's House of Incest

chapter 9|15 pages

“Found his anxiety frothing”

Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure and the Hotel as Camp Allegory

part |45 pages

Labour, Love

chapter 10|13 pages

“The hotel story he made up”

Hotel Life, Death, and Work in James Joyce's Ulysses

chapter 12|16 pages

White Women and Cheap Hotels

part |45 pages

Theory, Design

chapter 13|12 pages

Rota Moderna

Vortex Force in Viennese Hotel Lobbies

chapter 14|16 pages

Grand Hotel Theory

chapter 15|15 pages

Prototype Hotels for the Jet Age