Introduction

This volume positions the distinctive space of the hotel within the broader map of modernism’s dynamic life and legacy and proposes it as a site of generative and multidimensional critical engagement. Enveloping the traces of presences or absences, hotels are key landmarks in the intellectual geography of modernism. The hotel narratives explored in the collection evoke personal and political crises that derive from or unfold in dynamic hotel spaces. Shared by all the contributions to this volume is the recognition of modernism’s peculiarly troubled, daring, performative, aesthetically and politically transformative hotel experience, or in other words what this volume calls hotel modernisms.