Abstract
This chapter reads Anne Enright’s short story “The Hotel” (2017) as a sophisticated response to a range of contemporary concerns around migration and refugees. The story approaches refugees’ experience of involuntary border crossing via the voluntary experience of international travel: Enright’s protagonist finds herself in a different country late at night after her flight is rerouted, and her search for the airport hotel seemingly leads her into a queue of people seeking asylum. Utilising core strengths of the modern short form, Enright’s story employs a fragmentary, open-ended and ambiguous approach in which the line between reality and sleep-deprived imagination becomes increasingly blurred.
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Einhaus, AM. (2019). Global Travel and In/Voluntary Border Crossings: Anne Enright’s “The Hotel”. In: Korte, B., Lojo-Rodríguez, L. (eds) Borders and Border Crossings in the Contemporary British Short Story. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30359-4_5
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