The Hotel Space Through the Senses in the Life and Works of Virginia Woolf

This thesis examines the function of the hotel space in modernist context through individual and collective sensory experiences in the novels and personal writings of Virginia Woolf. The modern conception of the hotel emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, operating as a new setting for modernist societal issues to be written in and of. The hotel is experienced by the individual first and foremost through its sensory offerings, and its unique position as a convergence point for larger, revolving groups of people allows novel sensory interactions as bodies share space and interconnect. My thesis establishes Woolf among her contemporaries as one of the most important modernist hotel authors; through my engagement with Woolf critics and sensory theorists, I analyse the wider implications of the auditory, tactile, and gustatory experiences found in Woolf's hotel writings on modernist social issues, including the public and private divide, women's liberation, class, and antisemitism.