1st Edition
Hotel Modernisms
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.
Introduction (Anna Despotopoulou, Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Efterpi Mitsi)
1. Hotel Trouble (Vassiliki Kolocotroni)
HOSPITALITIES, COMMUNITIES
2. "Blank, blond horror": The Hotel as Medical Facility (Robbie Moore)
3. Hotel Performance and its Remains: Jean Cocteau and Mary Butts at the Welcome (Joel Hawkes)
4. Performing Belonging in Early Twentieth-Century Literary Hotels and the Case of Rich Americans (Bettina Matthias)
5. "No longer a hotel": Colonial Decadence in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet (Athanasios Dimakis)
ROOMS, VIEWS
6. Landslide at the Pension Bertolini: Anti-tourism versus Groundless Transculturalism in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (Shawna Ross)
7. H.D.’s Hotel Visions (Polly Hember)
8. Carnivorous Flowers and Poisoned Webs: Surrealist Experimentation in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Anaïs Nin’s House of Incest (Josie Cray)
9. "Found his anxiety frothing": Denton Welch’s In Youth Is Pleasure and the Hotel as Camp Allegory (Allan Pero)
LABOUR, LOVE
10. "The hotel story he made up": Hotel Life, Death, and Work in James Joyce’s Ulysses (Emma Short)
11. Life and Work in Interwar "Cathedrals of Modernity" (Ulrike Zitzlsperger)
12. White Women and Cheap Hotels (Tyler T. Schmidt)
THEORY, DESIGN
13. Rota Moderna: Vortex Force in Viennese Hotel Lobbies (Rajesh Heynickx)
14. Grand Hotel Theory (John Hoffmann)
15. Prototype Hotels for the Jet Age (Bruce Peter)
Biography
Anna Despotopoulou is Professor in English Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
Vassiliki Kolocotroni is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow.
Efterpi Mitsi is Professor in English Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
