Overview
This volume examines the hotel experience of Anglo-American travelers in the nineteenth century from the viewpoint of literary and cultural studies as well as spatiality theory. Focusing on the social and imaginary space of the hotel in fiction, periodicals, diaries, and travel accounts, the essays shed new light on nineteenth-century notions of travel writing. Analyzing the liminal space of the hotel affords a new way of understanding the freedoms and restrictions felt by travelers from different social classes and nations. As an environment that forced travelers to reimagine themselves or their cultural backgrounds, the hotel could provide exhilarating moments of self-discovery or dangerous feelings of alienation. It could prove liberating to the tourist seeking an escape from prescribed gender roles or social class constructs. The book addresses changing notions of nationality, social class, and gender in a variety of expansive or oppressive hotel milieu: in the private space of the hotel room and in the public spaces (foyers, parlors, dining areas). Sections address topics including nationalism and imperialism; the mundane vs. the supernatural; comfort and capitalist excess; assignations, trysts, and memorable encounters in hotels; and women’s travels. The book also offers a brief history of inns and hotels of the time period, emphasizing how hotels play a large role in literary texts, where they frequently reflect order and disorder in a personal and/or national context. This collection will appeal to scholars in literature, travel writing, history, cultural studies, and transnational studies, and to those with interest in travel and tourism, hospitality, and domesticity.
Full Product Details
Author: Monika Elbert ,
Susanne Schmid
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint: Routledge
Weight: 0.453kg
ISBN: 9780367878467
ISBN 10: 0367878461
Pages: 298
Publication Date: 10 December 2019
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Monika M. Elbert and Susanne Schmid’s Anglo-American Travelers and the Hotel Experience in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nation, Hospitality, Travel Writing provides an exploration of the nineteenth-century hotel culture that brings these anxieties to the fore. The essays in the volume offer historical and cultural approaches to the fiction, diaries, and travel accounts...Elbert and Schmid’s insightful introduction places the volume into context, giving the reader a rich history of hotels, those who traveled through them, and the ways in which these spaces have been written about in literature and contemporary hotel theory. - Reviewed by H. J. E. Champion, Edith Wharton Review
Monika M. Elbert and Susanne Schmid's Anglo-American Travelers and the Hotel Experience in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nation, Hospitality, Travel Writing provides an exploration of the nineteenth-century hotel culture that brings these anxieties to the fore. The essays in the volume offer historical and cultural approaches to the fiction, diaries, and travel accounts...Elbert and Schmid's insightful introduction places the volume into context, giving the reader a rich history of hotels, those who traveled through them, and the ways in which these spaces have been written about in literature and contemporary hotel theory. - Reviewed by H. J. E. Champion, Edith Wharton Review
Author Information
Monika Elbert is Professor of English and Distinguished University Scholar at Montclair State University, USA. Susanne Schmid has taught at various universities and authored several books, among them the Helene Richter Award-winning Shelley's German Afterlives 1814–2000 (2007) and British Literary Salons of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (2013). She co-edited Drink in the eighteenth and nineteenth Centuries (2014).
