Contagionism and Contagious Diseases (Medicine and Literature 1880-1933)

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. "Social contagionism": psychology, criminology and sociology in the slipstream of infection -- Olaf Briese. The overlap of discourses of contagion: economic, sexual, and psychological -- George Rousseau. Exoticism, bacteriology and the staging of the dangerous -- Christoph Gradmann. Rousing emotions in the description of contagious diseases in modernism -- Thomas Anz. Anarchist and Aphrodite: on the literary history of germs -- Martina King. " [...] an entirely new form of bacteria for them": contagionism and its consequences in Laßwitz and Wells -- Nicholas Saul. Genius and degenerate? Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus and a medical discourse on syphilis -- Thomas Rütten. Aweysha: spiritual epidemics and psychic contagion in the works of Gustav Meyrink -- Luis Montiel. Living with rats and mosquitoes: different paradigms of cohabitation with parasites in a German narrative of contagion around 1930 -- Rudolf Käser. Infectious diseases in Max Frisch-- Yahua Elsadhe 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 Biographical note: Martina King, Universität Bern, Switzerland; Thomas Rütten, Newcastle University, UK Biographical note: Martina King, Universität Bern, Schweiz; Thomas Rütten, Newcastle University, UK