Contagionism and Contagious Diseases Medicine and Literature 1880-1933
:
Thomas Rütten, Martina King
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Contagionism and Contagious Diseases Medicine and Literature 1880-1933
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Walter de Gruyter GmbH& Co.KG
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9783110306118
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spectrum Literaturwissenschaft / spectrum LiteratureISSN
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1
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CHF 124.20
:
:
Kulturgeschichte
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English
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248
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Wasserzeichen/DRM
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PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
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PDF
Understanding how‘contagion’ and‘infection’ have become powerful metaphors requires a historical reconstruction of this semantic field in the late 19th and early 20th century, when these concepts acquired a scientific meaning. The volume offers an interdisciplinary approach to the cultural history of contagionism between medical bacteriology, the social sciences and literary adaptations. The symbolic implications of‘contagion’ and high-profile contagious diseases are addressed, which mark the boundaries between sick and healthy, familiar and alien, morally pure and impure.
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Martina King,
University of Bern, Switzerland;
Thomas Rütten,
Newcastle University, UK.
Table of Contents
5
Introduction
7
‘Social Contagionism’: Psychology, Criminology and Sociology in the Slipstream of Infection
23
The Overlap of Discourses of Contagion: Economic, Sexual, and Psychological
47
Exoticism, Bacteriology and the Staging of the Dangerous
71
Rousing Emotions in the Description of Contagious Diseases in Modernism
89
Anarchist and Aphrodite: On the Literary History of Germs
107
“[…] an entirely new form of bacteria for them”: Contagionism and its Consequences in Laßwitz and Wells
137
Genius and Degenerate? Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and a Medical Discourse on Syphilis
153
Aweysha: Spiritual Epidemics and Psychic Contagion in the Works of Gustav Meyrink
173
Living with Rats and Mosquitoes: Different Paradigms of Cohabitation with Parasites in a German Narrative of Contagion around 1930
191
Infectious Diseases in Max Frisch
215
Afterword
231
Notes on Contributors
239
Index of Names and Works
243
