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This chapter follows the rise of the hotel corporation and hotel managerialism from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1930s, through the work of Henry James (The American Scene), Arnold Bennett (The Grand Babylon Hotel and Imperial Palace), Sinclair Lewis (Work of Art), Henry Green (Party Going), and corporate movie studios (BIS and MGM). The chapter starts with the observation that the newly professionalised role of hotel manager gained cultural authority through the rhetoric of scientific management, even as the hotel manager in this period was repeatedly figured as a kind of artist and the hotel as a work of art. Moving from James’s figuration of the Waldorf-Astoria’s management as a shadowy rival author, to Bennett’s and Lewis’s manager-poets of the 1930s, and the managerial eye of MGM’s Grand Hotel, the chapter considers the hotel manager as a classed and gendered fantasy figure of authorial power and omniscience within corporate modernity. Henry Green’s resistance to managerial and narratorial authority in Party Going, set in the near-bankrupt Grosvenor Hotel at the end of the grand hotel era, brings the historical narrative of the book to a close.

While the cultural dominance of Constantinople helps explain the formal homogeneity and character of Byzantine art in the provinces of the empire, how is one to recover the paradigms for the Middle Byzantine artistic repertoire? This chapter argues that particular lost churches of Constantinople most likely served as the models for mosaiced and frescoed churches in the capital and around the Byzantine Empire. The original mosaic decoration surviving in Hagia Sophia, along with descriptions of mosaics in lost buildings in the Imperial Palace and monastic churches in and around the city, helps consolidate the picture. In addition, textual sources also provide precious testimony on the connotations and associations of the medium of mosaic at this time.

This introductory chapter examines the censorship in the literary and film history narratives of Japan. The country has infamous cases of artists being persecuted by the official censors. Most notable among them are: the murder of proletariat writer Kobayashi Takiji in a police custody for his treasonous writings, and the violent attack by a right-wing youth on the publisher of Fukazawa Shichirō’s 1959 story, which depicts the severed heads of imperial family members rolling down the Imperial Palace steps. Such incidents are often cited to prove that art in Japan has been at the mercy of pervasive censorship throughout much of its modern history. This conception demonstrates the censor as having the power to exercise a political or legal judgment on a work of art, and the artist as being either admirably subversive or unscrupulously complicit.