Hospitality In American Literature And Culture

This volume examines hospitality in American immigrant literature and culture, situating this ancient virtue at the crossroads of space and border theory, and exploring the relationship among the intersecting themes of migration, citizenship, identity formation, and spatiality. Assessing the conditions, duration, and shifting roles of hosts and guests in the United States, the book concentrates on the ways the US administers protocols of belonging and non-belonging, and distinguishes between those who can feel at home from those who will always be outside the body politic, even if they were the original "hosts." The volume opens with a genealogy of hospitality through a focus on its sites, from its origins in the Bible, to its national and post-national renditions in contemporary American literature and culture. The authors explore recent representations of immigrant spatiality, from the space of the body in Spielberg’s The Terminal and Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things, to the different ways in which immigrants are incorporated into the United States in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer, Karen T. Yamashita’s I Hotel, Junot Díaz’s "Invierno," and Ernesto Quiñonez’s Chango’s Fire, concluding with the spectrality of the immigrant body in George Saunders’ "The Semplica Girl Diaries." Timely and imperative in light of the legacies of colonialism, and the realities of modern-day globalization, this book will be of value to specialists in post-colonialism; American Studies; immigration, diaspora, and border studies; and critical race and gender studies for its innovative approaches to media and literary texts.

The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in U.S. Literature and Culture explores hospitality in literature, language and cinema from a variety of methodological perspectives that illustrate the richness of American hospitality.

This book examines hospitality in American immigrant literature and culture, situating it at the crossroads of space and border theory, and exploring themes of migration, citizenship, identity formation, and spatiality. Assessing the conditions, duration, and shifting roles of hosts and guests in the US, it visits recent representations of immigrant spatiality, from the space of the body in film to the ways in which immigrants are incorporated into the US in a range of literary examples. Timely and imperative in light of the legacies of colonialism, and the realities of modern-day globalization, this book will be of value to fields including post-colonialism, American Studies, and others.

This volume examines hospitality in American immigrant literature and culture, situating this ancient virtue at the crossroads of space and border theory, and exploring the relationship among the intersecting themes of migration, citizenship, identity formation, and spatiality. Assessing the conditions, duration, and shifting roles of hosts and guests in the United States, the book concentrates on the ways the US administers protocols of belonging and non-belonging, and distinguishes between those who can feel at home from those who will always be outside the body politic, even if they were the original "hosts." The volume opens with a genealogy of hospitality through a focus on its sites, from its origins in the Bible, to its national and post-national renditions in contemporary American literature and culture. The authors explore recent representations of immigrant spatiality, from the space of the body in Spielberg's The Terminal and Frears's Dirty Pretty Things, to the different ways in which immigrants are incorporated into the United States in Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer, Karen T. Yamashita's I Hotel, Junot Díaz's "Invierno," and Ernesto Quiñonez's Chango's Fire, concluding with the spectrality of the immigrant body in George Saunders' "The Semplica Girl Diaries." Timely and imperative in light of the legacies of colonialism, and the realities of modern-day globalization, this book will be of value to specialists in post-colonialism; American Studies; immigration, diaspora, and border studies; and critical race and gender studies for its innovative approaches to media and literary texts.

With contributions from an international array of scholars, this volume opens a dialogue between discourses of security and hospitality in modern and contemporary literature and culture. The chapters in the volume span domestic spaces and detention camps, the experience of migration and the phenomena of tourism, interpersonal exchanges and cross-cultural interventions. The volume explores the multifarious ways in which subjects, citizens, communities, and states negotiate the mutual, and potentially exclusive, desires to secure themselves and offer hospitality to others. From the individual’s telephone and data, to the threshold of the family home, to the borders of the nation, sites of securitization confound hospitality’s injunction to openness, gifting, and refuge. In demonstrating an interrelation between ongoing discussions of hospitality and the intensifying attention to security, the book engages with a range of literary, cultural, and geopolitical contexts, drawing on work from other disciplines, including philosophy, political science, and sociology. Further, it defines a new interdisciplinary area of inquiry that resonates with current academic interests in world literature, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism.

Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture inscribes itself within the spatial turn that permeates the ways we look at literary and cultural productions. The volume seeks to clarify the connections between race, space, class, and identity as it concentrates on different occupations and disoccupations, enclosures and boundaries. Space is scaled up and down, from the body, the ground zero of spatiality, to the texturology of Manhattan; from the striated place of the office in Melville’s "Bartleby, the Scrivener" on Wall Street, to the striated spaces of internment camps and reservations; from the lowest of the low, the (human) clutter that lined the streets of Albany, NY, during the Depression, to the new Towers of Babel that punctuate the contemporary architecture of transparencies. As it strings together these spatial narratives, the volume reveals how, beyond the boundaries that characterize each space, every location has loose ends that are impossible to contain.

This book examines what literature and film reveal about the urban USA. Subjects include culture, class, race, crime, and disaster.

Hospitality as a cultural trait has been associated with the South for well over two centuries, but the origins of this association and the reasons for its perseverance often seem unclear. Anthony Szczesiul looks at how and why we have taken something so particular as the social habit of hospitality—which is exercised among diverse individuals and is widely varied in its particular practices—and so generalized it as to make it a cultural trait of an entire region of the country. Historians have offered a variety of explanations of the origins and cultural practices of hospitality in the antebellum South. Economic historians have at times portrayed southern hospitality as evidence of conspicuous consumption and competition among wealthy planters, while cultural historians have treated it peripherally as a symptomatic expression of the southern code of honor. Although historians have offered different theories, they generally agree that the mythic dimensions of southern hospitality eventually outstripped its actual practices. Szczesiul examines why we have chosen to remember and valorize this particular aspect of the South, and he raises fundamental ethical questions that underlie both the concept of hospitality and the cultural work of American memory, particularly in light of the region’s historical legacy of slavery and segregation.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Introduction -- 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 -- 2 English Inns and Hotels in Nineteenth-Century Fiction -- 3 American Accommodation: Transatlantic Travel, Boardinghouse Settlers, and Hotel Culture -- PART II: The Mundane vs. the Supernatural: Domesticity, Danger, or Mystery in Hotels -- 4 Hawthorne and Hotels in Great Britain -- 5 A Tomb with a View: Supernatural Experiences in the Late Nineteenth Century's Egyptian Hotels -- 6 Dark Hostelries: Gothic Hotels and Inns in the Long Nineteenth Century -- 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 -- 8 Henry James and "The Testimony of the Hotel" to Transatlantic Encounters -- 9 Gilded-Age Hotel Culture and the Construction of American Leisure-Class Identity -- PART IV: Assignations, Trysts, and Memorable Encounters in Hotels -- 10 The Inns of Romantic Drama -- 11 George Eliot and George Henry Lewes: Respectable Adultery and Anonymous Celebrity -- 12 Edith Wharton's American and French Hotels: A Permeable Private/Public Space -- 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 -- 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 -- 15 Afterword -- List of Contributors -- Name Index -- Hotel Index