Professor Astrid Köhler (QMUL) joins us to discuss the HERA funded project The European Spa as a Transnational Public Space and Social Metaphor. Astrid engaged in the project from May 2019 to December 2022 and she was one of its four Principal Investigators.
Be it Jane Austen or Walter Scott, Feodor Dostoevsky or Ivan Turgenev, Guy de Maupassant or Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach: 19th-Century European novelists evinced a special fondness for setting their stories in Spa towns. Towards the turn of the century, however, spas gradually lose their appeal, and their place is taken by the sanatorium as an increasingly frequent literary setting. In this respect, Thomas Mann’s 'Magic Mountain' (1924) is merely the tip of an iceberg.
The lecture seeks to shed light on this shift by considering the changes of social and medical function of health resorts around 1900, the illnesses treated (or at least mitigated) in sanatoria, and the various aesthetic and thematic implications both the ailments and the institutions to which they were confined had for the writers engaging with them.
Join us for tea/coffee from 3:45pm in the Trent Building B38a!
Dates for your diaries for the spring semester:
8 March: Alicia Fernández Gallego-Casilda (Autonomous University of Barcelona/Nottingham), 'Translation as Propaganda: British Poetic Involvement in the Spanish Civil War'
29 March: Adelaide McGinity-Peebles, 'Representations of Russian and Soviet colonialism in the Arctic in Contemporary Cinema'
3 May: Alison Fell (Liverpool), 'Joan of Arc as a Cultural Model for Armed Women in the Global South, 1870-1945'