“Guide to a Disturbed Planet”: Modernist travel and the Cosmopolitics of Hospitality in Rebecca West

This paper explores the notion of hospitality in British modernist travel literature, and argues for its significance to the period in initiating a cosmopolitics that paradoxically both challenges and capitulates to nationalist thinking, and to the privileged status that comes with a universalist cosmopolitan perspective. It uses the work of Rebecca West to demonstrate how moments of embodied and textual hospitality in literary modernism complicate the imperial imaginary of interwar Britain and contribute to a more cosmopolitan outlook, even as the text continues to promote nationalist thinking.