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.
