Abstract
This chapter analyses the hotel as a ‘textual space’ and charts the development of a ‘hotel narrative’ from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Short explores how the hotel necessarily shapes narrative form and structure through the movement along its corridors from room to room, creating an episodic structure well suited to genre fiction such as the detective or mystery novel, as exemplified by Bennett’s The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902). But she argues that this same ‘hotel narrative’ structure can be found in modernist works, such as Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915). Through her analysis of the hotel narrative, Short reveals experiments with narrative and form to be widespread across the literatures of modernity.
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Notes
- 1.
The increasing critical significance of this field led to the establishment of the journal, Literary Geographies, in 2015.
- 2.
Here, Kort cites: J. Nicholas Entrikin, The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 128.
- 3.
See also: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: Or, the Limits of Poetry and Painting. Translated by William A. Steel (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1930).
- 4.
Frank does go on, however, to discuss spatial form in reference to Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Barnes’s Nightwood (1936). In addition to this, critics such as William A. Johnsen recognise and articulate the links between Flaubert’s 1856 novel and modernism. See: William A. Johnsen, ‘ Madame Bovary : Romanticism, Modernism, and Bourgeois Style’, MLN 94 (4) (1979): 843–850.
- 5.
See Chap. 5 for further discussion of this.
- 6.
That Hirst is reading his book ‘by candle-light’ is worth noting here, as in all the rooms described so far, lights have been ‘turned off’, indicating the presence of electric lights. The lack of electric lights, and the fact that his room is on an upper floor, reveals this to be a cheaper room than those occupied by Miss Allan, Susan Warrington, and the Elliots. See Chap. 5 for further discussion of the social code of hotel bedrooms.
- 7.
From 1895, when he began work on his first novel, A Man from the North (1898), until his death from typhoid fever in 1931.
- 8.
Six small towns—Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Fenton, and Longton—which today make up the city of Stoke-on-Trent in the West Midlands of England. Bennett himself was born in Hanley in 1867, moving later to Burslem with his family, and the area was depicted as ‘the Five Towns’ in his writings, omitting Fenton.
- 9.
Recent scholarship on Bennett includes a collection of essays, entitled An Arnold Bennett Companion. Edited by John Shapcott (Leek: Churnet Valley Books, 2015); John Squillace’s monograph, Modernism, Modernity, and Arnold Bennett (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1997); and a Broadview edition of The Grand Babylon Hotel . Edited by Randi Saloman (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2016).
- 10.
Virginia Woolf was also fairly damning about Bennett’s immense rate of production, remarking in her 1924 essay, ‘Character in Fiction’ (which had evolved out of her previous essay, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ ), that: ‘I am not going to deny that Mr Bennett has some reason when he complains that our Georgian writers are unable to make us believe that our characters are real. I am forced to agree that they do not pour out three immortal masterpieces with Victorian regularity every autumn’. See: Virginia Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, in Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw, 37–54 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 51.
- 11.
These include the Bristol Hotel, the Prince of Wales Hotel, the Augusta Victoria Hotel, Park Hotel, and the Railway Hotel.
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Short, E. (2019). Along the Corridor: Charting the Hotel Narrative. In: Mobility and the Hotel in Modern Literature. Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22129-4_2
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