Henrike Schmidt, Astrid Köhler
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
Published 20 Feb 2025
Format Hardback
ISBN 9781350377967
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).
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Writing (in) the Resort
1. Imbricated (Hi)Stories: Spa Guides, Spa Tourism and Literary Imaginings
2. Modern Founding Myths: The Creation of Health Resorts in Literature
3. From the Spa to the Sanatorium: Changing the Setting
4. Of Meandering Motifs and Erupting Source Texts. Exemplary Intertextual Trajectories Within (and Beyond) the European Resort Narrative
5. Scrutinizing Health Resorts as Places of Discipline and Surveillance
6. Spas and Sanatoria as Places of Trauma and Memory
7. All our Yesterdays: Paradigms of Reflective Nostalgia
8. The Health Resort in the Popular Literary Imagination
9. The New Worlds of Wellness
10. Conclusion. The Phantasmatic Power of the European Resort Narrative
Bibliography
Notes
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