Professor Astrid Köhler's latest monograph Health Resort in Modern European Literature: Transnational Trajectories, co-authored with Henrike Schmidt has been published Open Access with Bloomsbury.
Summary:
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.
See more about Prof Köhler's work here.