The Health Resort in Modern European Literature - by Henrike Schmidt & Astrid Köhler (Paperback)

About the Book

An exploration of the 'literary spa' from its inception in the Enlightenment period to the wellness age of the 21st century.

Book Synopsis

This innovative open access book reappraises the health resort in literature from its rise in the late Enlightenment period to the wellness age of the 21st century. Most of the existing body of academic work on the subject is concerned with either the classic spa novel or sanatorium narratives, and focuses on distinct national literatures, selected canonical texts, and particular themes. Contrary to this convention The Health Resort in Modern European Literature covers all types of health resort texts and sees them as part of a "transnational resort narrative" that covers the whole of Europe. Its uniquely broad corpus goes beyond the famous English, French, German and Russian novels and includes work in all genres, by female and male authors, from high literature and popular culture, in less studied languages such as Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Polish, Swedish or Ukrainian, right up to the present day.

Drawing on theorists such as Barthes, Deleuze and Foucault, Henrike Schmidt and Astrid Köhler compellingly argue that the literary health resort represents a social microcosm that responds to and reflects historical developments in special ways. Being an 'other place' where time and space are configured differently, it has both utopian and dystopian potential, while its intertextual interconnectedness enables it to interrogate assumptions and discourses not just about sickness and health, but also about European society in its different iterations.

The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA).

Review Quotes

"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." --Eric T. Jennings, Professor of History, University of Toronto, Canada

About the Author

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.