Health Resort in Modern European Literature

Astrid Köhler is Professor of German Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies at Queen Mary University of London, UK. Her research interests are divided between the cultural history of late 18th & 19th Century Europe and contemporary German Literature on the other. With regard to the former, she has published on salons and other forms of sociability as well as on public rituals and festivities, literary journals and prose fiction of the period.Henrike Schmidt is Private Lecturer at the Peter Szondi-Institute of Comparative Literature, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. She specializes in Slavic cultural and literary history (Russian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Polish literature). She also deals with topics of media representation, especially in digital and social media.

This book makes a wide-ranging and compelling contribution to the transnational turn in spa and comparative literature. It also spans eras and cultures, guiding readers from the golden era of spas in the 19th century through Cold War Communist waters, through to the present. The topics tackled are varied and captivating: the founding of spas, sociability, liaisons, social control, surveillance, poetry, avant-garde movements, nostalgia, horror, to name only a few. The cast of characters is truly spell-binding: Karl Marx, Guy de Maupassant, Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, to name only a few.

• List of IllustrationsIntroduction: Writing (in) the Resort1. Imbricated (Hi)Stories: Spa Guides, Spa Tourism and Literary Imaginings2. Modern Founding Myths: The Creation of Health Resorts in Literature3. From the Spa to the Sanatorium: Changing the Setting4. Of Meandering Motifs and Erupting Source Texts. Exemplary Intertextual Trajectories Within (and Beyond) the European Resort Narrative5. Scrutinizing Health Resorts as Places of Discipline and Surveillance6. Spas and Sanatoria as Places of Trauma and Memory7. All our Yesterdays: Paradigms of Reflective Nostalgia8. The Health Resort in the Popular Literary Imagination9. The New Worlds of Wellness10. Conclusion. The Phantasmatic Power of the European Resort NarrativeBibliographyNotes