What is a hotel? As Caroline Field Levander and Matthew Pratt Guterl show us in this thought-provoking book, even though hotels are everywhere around us, we rarely consider their essential role in our modern existence and how they help frame our sense of who and what we are. They are, in fact, as centrally important as other powerful places like prisons, hospitals, or universities. More than simply structures made of steel, concrete, and glass, hotels are social and political institutions that we invest with overlapping and contradictory meaning. These alluring places uniquely capture the realities of our world, where the lines between public and private, labor and leisure, fortune and failure, desire and despair are regularly blurred. Guiding readers through the story of hotels as places of troublesome possibility, as mazelike physical buildings, as inspirational touchstones for art and literature, and as unsettling, even disturbing, backdrops for the drama of everyday life, Levander and Guterl ensure that we will never think about this seemingly ordinary place in the same way again.

What is a hotel? As Caroline Field Levander and Matthew Pratt Guterl show us in this thought-provoking book, even though hotels are everywhere around us, we rarely consider their essential role in our modern existence and how they help frame our sense of who and what we are. They are, in fact, as centrally important as other powerful places like prisons, hospitals, or universities. More than simply structures made of steel, concrete, and glass, hotels are social and political institutions that we invest with overlapping and contradictory meaning. These alluring places uniquely capture the realities of our world, where the lines between public and private, labor and leisure, fortune and failure, desire and despair are regularly blurred. Guiding readers through the story of hotels as places of troublesome possibility, as mazelike physical buildings, as inspirational touchstones for art and literature, and as unsettling, even disturbing, backdrops for the drama of everyday life, Levander and Guterl ensure that we will never think about this seemingly ordinary place in the same way again.

Throughout the nineteenth century, American fiction displayed a fascination with women's speech - describing how women's voices sound, what happens when women speak and what reactions their speech produces, especially in their male listeners. Voices of the Nation argues that closer inspection of these recurring descriptions also performed political work that has had a profound - though unspecified to date - impact on American culture. Commentaries on the female voice were propounded by writers such as Henry James, William Dean Howells and Noah Webster, and these texts played a central role in attempts to define and enforce the radical social changes instituted by the emerging bourgeoisie.

Throughout the nineteenth century, American authors such as Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Noah Webster displayed a fascination with women's speech--describing how women's voices sound, what happens when women speak, and what reactions their speech produces, especially in their male listeners. Voices of the Nation argues that closer inspection of these recurring descriptions also performed political work that has had a profound--though unspecified to date--impact on American culture.

Recent debates about globalism have usefully transformed the positioning and the cultural geography of studies of the American South. Once marked by tensions between the national and the regional, southern studies is now increasingly characterized by tensions between the local and the global. This special issue of American Literature features interdisciplinary and comparative work that focuses on the U.S. South in global contexts and attempts to reconceptualize the South from various theoretical, literary, and cultural perspectives. The new southern studies promises to be less preoccupied with patriarchal whiteness and rural idyll and more concerned with understanding the U.S. South as a construction of border crossings of every sort. Featured essays examine the political, economic, and social effects of globalization on the geopolitical locale and literary productions of the region. Each seeks to redefine the geographic and epistemological boundaries of the U.S. South by linking it to other "Souths" globally. The issue opens with a collection of manifestos given at the recent conference "The U.S. South in Global Context." These unique pieces offer variant perspectives on a common theme. Touching on history, community, migration, globalizing modernization, and even Wal-Mart, these sixteen briefs remind the reader that the American South is somewhere between the modern cosmopolitan and the historical rural spheres. One contributor examines how modernization has spread unevenly throughout the region and how it has affected recent immigrants to southern hybrid culture. Another engages in a comparative exercise between the U.S. South and Latin America, addressing questions of postcolonialism. Other contributors reflect on southern distinctiveness, southern literature, and southern colonial life. Included in the issue is a collection of original and review essays focused geographically on still lower latitudes: investigations of the Deep South and certain Caribbean cultures, and comparisons of the U.S. South to the underprivileged global South.