Contagionism and Contagious Diseases
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Edited by:
Thomas Rütten
About this book
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.
Author / Editor information
Martina King, University of Bern, Switzerland; Thomas Rütten, Newcastle University, UK.
Supplementary Materials
Topics
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Frontmatter
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Table of Contents
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Introduction
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‘Social Contagionism’: Psychology, Criminology and Sociology in the Slipstream of Infection
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The Overlap of Discourses of Contagion: Economic, Sexual, and Psychological
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Exoticism, Bacteriology and the Staging of the Dangerous
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Rousing Emotions in the Description of Contagious Diseases in Modernism
83 -
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Anarchist and Aphrodite: On the Literary History of Germs
101 -
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“[…] an entirely new form of bacteria for them”: Contagionism and its Consequences in Laßwitz and Wells
131 -
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Genius and Degenerate? Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and a Medical Discourse on Syphilis
147 -
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Aweysha: Spiritual Epidemics and Psychic Contagion in the Works of Gustav Meyrink
167 -
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Living with Rats and Mosquitoes: Different Paradigms of Cohabitation with Parasites in a German Narrative of Contagion around 1930
185 -
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Infectious Diseases in Max Frisch
209 -
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Afterword
225 -
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Notes on Contributors
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Index of Names and Works
237
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