Hosts, Hospitals and Hospitalities
Narratives of (in)hospitality in literature, culture and the arts
Distributed for UCL Press
Hosts, Hospitals and Hospitalities
Narratives of (in)hospitality in literature, culture and the arts
This book analyzes narratives of hospitality (and inhospitality) through recent crises like climate change and mass displacement.
Current historical and political issues, such as the refugee crisis and climate emergency, are deeply intertwined with notions, images, and narratives of (in)hospitality. Departing from seminal works, such as those by Kant and Derrida, on this topic, the chapters in this volume examine how new postcolonial, gender, environmental, and medical perspectives reshape current approaches to hospitality in literature, culture, and the arts.
Through a comparison of case studies in multiple national settings, Hosts, Hospitals and Hospitalities shows how the concept of hospitality shapes the way in which we relate with “the Other” in diverse—and ever-evolving—cultural, political, social, and environmental contexts. By examining the issue of hospitality from a post-pandemic standpoint, which revised the roles of our private and public spaces in the aftermath of COVID-19, by dwelling on novel issues of climate emergency, and by focusing on current developments in terms of migration and displacement, this book adds new light and significant theoretical and methodological perspectives to previous debates about hospitality.
300 pages | 6.14 x 9.21 | © 2026
Comparative Literature and Culture
Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory
Table of Contents
List of contributors
1 Introduction
Susana Araújo, Catarina Nunes de Almeida and Santiago Pérez Isasi
Part I: (Post-)Colonial Hospitalities
2 Space and strangeness in Portuguese literature: Writing resistance and identity re-existence in the postcolonial context
Inocência Mata
3 Crèvecœur’s Land of the Free: Questioning the foundations of American hospitality
Judith Still
4 Transcultural hospitality. Guest friendship in Dionisia Alfaro’s Autobiografía de una líder arhuaca
Juan Camilo Brigard
Part II: Hospitalities, Hospitals and Medicalizations
5 Diagnosis as (in)hospitality: the case of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome
Mar Rosàs Tosas
6 (In)Hospitable hosts: Close reading depictions of hospitality and hospitals in HIV/AIDS narratives
Leonardo Cascão
Part III: (In)hospitable Homes, Families and Heritages
7 Inhospitable gendered places: The haunted house and the female ghost in neo-Victorian fiction and what it can tell us about female agency
M. Francisca B. B. de Alvarenga
8 We have guests: (In)hospitality in multi-generational novels
Serena Cianciotto
9 Third Space and hospitality: Modal intertextuality and the threshold of the unhomely in Kamel Daoud’s Zabor, ou Les psaumes (2017)
Eric Wistrom
Part IV. Hospitality in the Anthropocene
10 ‘Literary Nesting’: Fictional responses to environmental inhospitality in the climate crisis
Silvia Vittonatto
11 Redefining hospitality in times of crisis: Relationality and vulnerability in Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army and Burntcoat
Constance Pompié
Part V: Borders, Otherness and the Ethics of Hospitality
12 ’My face is a breaking point’: hospitality and inhospitality in Spring by Ali Smith
Elisa Santoro
13 Inhospitality toward Otherness in Marko Hautala’s ‘Pale Toes’
Johannes Melander
14 A breakdown in ethical practices: Forms of hospitality in Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat
Mathias Overgaard
Part VI: Negotiations and Redefinitions of Hospitality
15 At home with the Alien: ‘Xeno’ and Xenofeminism
Vít Bohal
16 Hospitality and periphery in Rosalía de Castro’s Costumbres Gallegas
Gisella Costas López
17 Epilogue: Hosting hospitalities at inhospitable times?
Susana Araújo, Catarina Nunes de Almeida and Santiago Pérez Isasi