Contagionism and Contagious Diseases : Medicine and Literature 1880-1933 / edited by Thomas Rütten and Martina King.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Rütten, Thomas.

King, Martina.

Series:

Spectrum Literaturwissenschaft ; 38.

Spectrum Literaturwissenschaft : Komparatistische Studien = Spectrum literature : comparative studies, 1860-210X ; Band 38

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Communicable diseases in literature.

Literature and medicine.

Contagion (Social psychology).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (248 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berlin ; Boston : De Gruyter, [2013]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The idea of contagious transmission, either by material particles or by infectious ideas, has played a powerful role in the development of the Western World since antiquity. Yet it acquired quite a precise signature during the process of scientific and cultural differentiation in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This volume explores the significance and cultural functions of contagionism in this period, from notions of infectious homosexuality and the concept of social contagion to the political implications of bacteriological fieldwork. The history of the concept 'microbe' in aesthetic modernism is adressed as well as bacteriological metaphors in American literary historiography. Within this broad framework, contagionism as a literary narrative is approached in more focussed contributions: from its emotional impact in literary modernism to the idea of physical or psychic contagion in authors such as H.G. Wells, Kurt Lasswitz, Gustav Meyrinck, Ernst Weiss, Thomas Mann and Max Frisch. This twofold approach of general topics and individual literary case studies produces a deeper understanding of the symbolic implications of contagionism marking the boundaries between sick and healthy, familiar and alien, morally pure and impure.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Table of Contents

Introduction / King, Martina / Rütten, Thomas

'Social Contagionism': Psychology, Criminology and Sociology in the Slipstream of Infection / Briese, Olaf

The Overlap of Discourses of Contagion: Economic, Sexual, and Psychological / Rousseau, George

Exoticism, Bacteriology and the Staging of the Dangerous / Gradmann, Christoph

Rousing Emotions in the Description of Contagious Diseases in Modernism / Anz, Thomas

Anarchist and Aphrodite: On the Literary History of Germs / King, Martina

"[...] an entirely new form of bacteria for them": Contagionism and its Consequences in Laßwitz and Wells / Saul, Nicholas

Genius and Degenerate? Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus and a Medical Discourse on Syphilis / Rütten, Thomas

Aweysha: Spiritual Epidemics and Psychic Contagion in the Works of Gustav Meyrink / Montiel, Luis

Living with Rats and Mosquitoes: Different Paradigms of Cohabitation with Parasites in a German Narrative of Contagion around 1930 / Käser, Rudolf

Infectious Diseases in Max Frisch / Elsaghe, Yahya

Afterword / Wald, Priscilla

Notes on Contributors

Index of Names and Works

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9783110306118

3110306115

OCLC:

865329957