Hotel Modernity: Corporate Space in Literature and Film

Hotel Modernity explores the impact of corporate space on the construction and texture of modern literature and film. It centres the hotel and corporate space as key sites of modern experience and culture. Examining architectural and financial records, hotel trade journals, travel journalism, advertisements and cinematic and literary representations, it charts the rise of hotel culture from 1870 to 1939. The book defines corporate space as the new urban, capital-intensive, large-scale spaces brought about by corporations during the nineteenth century, including department stores, railway stations and banking halls. Only in hotels, however, did the individual live within corporate space: sleeping in its beds and lounging in its parlours. The hotel structured intimate encounters with the impersonal and the anonymous, representing a radically new mode of experience. In chapters featuring readings of both canonical and relatively little-studied texts by Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Bowen, Arnold Bennett, and Henry Green, alongside films by F. W. Murnau, Segundo de Chomón, and Charlie Chaplin, Hotel Modernity considers the relationship between new kinds of spatial organisation and new forms of subjective and intersubjective life. Hotels provoked these writers and filmmakers to rethink the conventions and functions of fictional characters. This book charts the warping and decentring of the category of ‘character’ within the corporate, architectural, informatic and technological networks which come to define hotel space in this period.