This book examines the hotel experience of Anglo-American travelers in the 19th century from the viewpoint of literary and cultural studies as well as spatiality theory.

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).

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Introduction

Monika M. Elbert and Susanne Schmid

PART I: Nationalism and Imperialism: The Hotel as Guidepost to National Interests

1 The Moral Economy of the Irish Hotel from the Union to the Famine

Melissa Fegan

2 English Inns and Hotels in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Susanne Schmid

3 American Accommodation: Transatlantic Travel, Boardinghouse Settlers, and Hotel Culture

Tamara S. Wagner

Part II: The Mundane vs the Supernatural: Domesticity, Danger, or Mystery in Hotels

4 Hawthorne and Hotels in Great Britain

Frederick Newberry

5 A Tomb with a View: Supernatural Experiences in the Late Nineteenth Century's Egyptian Hotels

Eleanor Dobson

6 Dark Hostelries: Gothic Hotels and Inns in the Long Nineteenth Century

Laurence Davies

PART III: From Comfort to Capitalist Excess: The Evolving Hotel Experience as Status Symbol

7 The Waldorf-Astoria and New York Society: Grand Hotel as Site of Modernity

Annabella Fick

8 Henry James and "the testimony of the hotel" to Transatlantic Encounters

Maureen E. Montgomery

9 Gilded-Age Hotel Culture and the Construction of American Leisure-Class Identity

Grace Tirapelle

PART IV: Assignations, Trysts, and Memorable Encounters in Hotels

10 The Inns of Romantic Drama

Frederick Burwick

11 George Eliot and George Henry Lewes: Respectable Adultery and Anonymous Celebrity

Kathleen McCormack

12 Edith Wharton's American and French Hotels: A Permeable Private/Public Space

Carole M. Shaffer-Koros

PART V: Women's Travels and the Hotel as Nexus between Private and Public Realms

13 "A Continual Recurrence of Bad Inns": Public Domesticity and Women's Travel in the Early Nineteenth Century

Pam Perkins

14 "I was in a fidget to know where we could possibly sleep": Antebellum Hospitality on the Margins of Nation in Caroline Kirkland's A New Home, Who'll Follow? and Eliza Farnham's Life in Prairie Land

Michelle Gaffner Wood

15 Afterword

Kevin J. James

List of Contributors

Index