Introduction

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Table of Contents v
3. Introduction 1
4. ‘Social Contagionism’: Psychology, Criminology and Sociology in the Slipstream of Infection 17
5. The Overlap of Discourses of Contagion: Economic, Sexual, and Psychological 41
6. Exoticism, Bacteriology and the Staging of the Dangerous 65
7. Rousing Emotions in the Description of Contagious Diseases in Modernism 83
8. Anarchist and Aphrodite: On the Literary History of Germs 101
9. “[…] an entirely new form of bacteria for them”: Contagionism and its Consequences in Laßwitz and Wells 131
10. Genius and Degenerate? Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and a Medical Discourse on Syphilis 147
11. Aweysha: Spiritual Epidemics and Psychic Contagion in the Works of Gustav Meyrink 167
12. Living with Rats and Mosquitoes: Different Paradigms of Cohabitation with Parasites in a German Narrative of Contagion around 1930 185
13. Infectious Diseases in Max Frisch 209
14. Afterword 225
15. Notes on Contributors 233
16. Index of Names and Works 237