Gendered Defenders, Marvel’s Heroines in Transmedia Spaces ed. by Bryan J. Carr and Meta G. Carstarphen (review)

temporality of hotels. The hotel contains a temporality of “meanwhile” (37), or a simultaneity, which unites guests into a community without any need for them to be acquainted with one another. Yet, hotels can also bring the temporal focus to the future moment, always anticipating “occupants who will visit (and then leave), on a round-trip tour, who are on their way” (142). Constantly ready to be turned over to the next guest, grand hotels detach themselves from recent pasts and histories, allowing for a sense of constant renewal through the incessant traffic of occupants. The most insightful element of Hotel London, though, is its evaluation of how hotels allowed London to create, negotiate, and maintain global connections. One level on which this happened is in the British Empire. In imperial outposts far from the British Isles, grand hotels sought to communicate London’s superiority while also integrating local design features often tinged with Orientalism. Beyond the metropole-to-colony relationship, London’s grand hotels became a means for England to compete with France and the United States, two nations that had already mastered their own respective aspects of the hospitality arts. For France, it was cuisine, management style, and elegance. For the US, it was modernity and scale. London’s hotels sought to unite all these features and outdo competitors across the English Channel and on the other side of the Atlantic.