Along the Corridor: Charting the Hotel Narrative

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.