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