The spa narrative of long 19th century Europe as map and network

Abstract

The resort network of modern Europe developed over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. Emerging at different times (first in Great Britain, then in France, then in Germany and Russia), all national spa centers in one way or another reproduce a single, taken from the Roman tradition of the term (as a result of direct “inheritance” or — as in Russia — through a foreign national settler) type of organization of living space. Being subordinated to the “dual purpose of curing and entertaining the sick” (Guy de Maupassant), this space turns out to be correlated with the idea of an “other” (different from normative-socialized) life. Separate segments of this single European network space of codified deviancy, linked typologically and genetically, can in turn be represented as bundles of various socio-cultural connections arising around specific spa “characters” (as an example — the literary and writing network of Baden-Baden resort). Finally, another type of connections correlated with the European spa environment is its literary representations, the 19th century European spa narrative, the main features and agents of which are discussed in the article, using Mikhail Bakhtin’s category of genre memory and with the help of the SNA method. The research allowed to separate out two important clusters within the European fictional spa narrative, firstly the lineage of Tobias Smollett and secondly the lineage of Walter Scott. Finally, it is demonstrated how both lines come together outside the 19th century in the work of W. G. Sebald.