This volume examines the hotel experience of Anglo-American travelers in the nineteenth century from the viewpoint of literary and cultural studies as well as spatiality theory. Focusing on the social and imaginary space of the hotel in fiction, periodicals, diaries, and travel accounts, the essays shed new light on nineteenth-century notions of travel writing. Analyzing the liminal space of the hotel affords a new way of understanding the freedoms and restrictions felt by travelers from different social classes and nations. As an environment that forced travelers to reimagine themselves or their cultural backgrounds, the hotel could provide exhilarating moments of self-discovery or dangerous feelings of alienation. It could prove liberating to the tourist seeking an escape from prescribed gender roles or social class constructs. The book addresses changing notions of nationality, social class, and gender in a variety of expansive or oppressive hotel milieu: in the private space of the hotel room and in the public spaces (foyers, parlors, dining areas). Sections address topics including nationalism and imperialism; the mundane vs. the supernatural; comfort and capitalist excess; assignations, trysts, and memorable encounters in hotels; and women’s travels. The book also offers a brief history of inns and hotels of the time period, emphasizing how hotels play a large role in literary texts, where they frequently reflect order and disorder in a personal and/or national context. This collection will appeal to scholars in literature, travel writing, history, cultural studies, and transnational studies, and to those with interest in travel and tourism, hospitality, and domesticity.

This book explores the dark, unruly, and self-destructive side of gift-giving as represented in nineteenth-century literary works by American authors. It asserts the centrality and relevance of gift exchange for modern American literary and intellectual history and reveals the ambiguity of the gift in various social and cultural contexts, including those of race, sex, gender, religion, consumption, and literature. Focusing on authors as diverse as Emerson, Kirkland, Child, Sedgwick, Hawthorne, Poe, Douglass, Stowe, Holmes, Henry James, Twain, Howells, Wilkins Freeman, and O. Henry as well as lesser-known, obscure, and anonymous authors, Dangerous Giving explores ambivalent relations between dangerous gifts, modern ideology of disinterested giving, and sentimental tradition.

This volume examines hotels, inns, restaurants, and travelling on luxurious trains and ships. The volume also explores social rituals, consumer culture, and issues of class and gender as well as the institutions of travelling for health, education, or any other purpose.

This book presents an alternative framework for reading nineteenth century women’s travel narratives by challenging the traditional paradigms which often limit women’s space in print culture. For the first time, through a comparative lens, a Latin American woman’s travel narrative is analyzed concomitantly with the narratives of a North American and a European writer. Contrary to the common assumption that Latin American women were powerless victims of imperialism, elite women had access to the predominant philosophies of their time, traveled around the globe, and wrote about their experiences. This book examines how an Argentinian writer, together with an English and an American writer, manipulate their bourgeois identity to inhabit the male dominated sphere of print culture. By travelling and publishing travel narratives, the three traveling women writers search for empowerment to establish their authority as writers and shapers of knowledge in literature. Utilizing several concepts and criticisms, including Aristotle’s rhetoric, Foucault’s theories, travel writing criticism, postcolonial discourse, and feminist literary criticism; this volume attempts to challenge old-fashioned architypes and confinements of gender for traveling women writers in the nineteenth century.

Victorian Alchemy explores nineteenth-century conceptions of ancient Egypt as this extant civilisation was being ‘rediscovered’ in the modern world. With its material remnants somewhat paradoxically symbolic of both antiquity and modernity (in the very currentness of Egyptological excavations), ancient Egypt was at once evocative of ancient magical power and of cutting-edge science, a tension that might be productively conceived of as ‘alchemical’. Allusions to ancient Egypt simultaneously lent an air of legitimacy to depictions of the supernatural while projecting a sense of enchantment onto representations of cutting-edge science. Examining literature and other cultural forms including art, photography and early film, Eleanor Dobson traces the myriad ways in which magic and science were perceived as entwined, and ancient Egypt evoked in parallel with various fields of study, from imaging technologies and astronomy, to investigations into the electromagnetic spectrum and the human mind itself. In so doing, counter to linear narratives of nineteenth-century progress, and demonstrating how ancient Egypt was more than a mere setting for Orientalist fantasies or nightmares, the book establishes how conceptions of modernity were inextricably bound up in the contemporary reception of the ancient world, and suggests how such ideas that took root and flourished in the Victorian era persist to this day.

Questions of Authority investigates Italian–Australian literary travel exchanges throughout the long nineteenth century. The 1800s witnessed major transformations in Australian overseas travel: it gradually evolved from a replica of the Continental Grand Tour of the British, to a more idiosyncratic cosmopolitan experience, either touristic or professional. Moreover, it was during the second half of this century that both Italy and Australia underwent crucial political upheavals; these resulted in shifts from colonial and subjugated status, to self-government and ultimately independence. This volume connects these geographical, political and sociocultural contexts of Italy and Australia by considering their interlaced odeporic library, produced at a significant time in history. Additionally, this book analyses key texts compiled by Italians in Australia, and Australians in Italy: these chiefly consist of voyage accounts, but also include the records of explorers, missionaries, scientists and migrants coming from the Italian peninsula. These primary sources include unpublished travel diaries compiled by the first Victorian women visitors to the Bel Paese, which have been largely neglected by scholarship thus far. This examination pinpoints the enduring significance of Italy in travel-related terms, showing how this destination was adapted from the map of eighteenth-century British Grand Tourists, to that of nineteenth-century Australian holiday makers. Most critically, Questions of Authority argues Italian–Australian peripatetic connections entail issues of authority, that emerge in the ways in which Italian and Australian travel writers displayed their authorship, cultural capital and national identification in relation to the other country. Finally, it demonstrates how these are highly regulated by, and yet simultaneously challenge, British colonial hegemony.

Tea on the terrace takes the reader on a journey up and down the Nile with famous archaeologists and Egyptologists. Spending time with these fascinating men and women at their hotels and on their boats, the book reveals that a great deal of archaeological work took place away from field sites and museums. Arriving in Alexandria, travellers such as Americans Theodore Davis, Emma Andrews and James Breasted, and Britons Wallis Budge, Maggie Benson and Howard Carter moved on to Cairo before heading south for Luxor, the site of the Ancient Egyptian city of Thebes. The book follows them on their journey, listening in on their conversations and observing their activities. Applying insights from social studies of science, it reveals that hotels in particular were crucial spaces for establishing careers, building and strengthening scientific networks, and generating and experimenting with new ideas. Combining archaeological tourism with the history of Egyptology, and drawing on a wide array of archival materials, Tea on the terrace takes the reader behind the scenes of familiar stories, showing Egyptologists’ activities in a whole new light.