The Specter of the Pandemic: Politics and Poetics of Cholera in 19th-Century Literature--An Introduction

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, cholera made a deep impression on the collective memory of entire generations. As a human-medical borderline experience, it was a scientific driving force, a political destabilizing factor, and a challenge to poetics. At the interface of literary studies and medical history and by using nineteenth-century literary texts from North American, British, and German authors as examples, this transnational study shows for the first time comprehensively, that despite a supposed “impossibility of narration”, the traumatic pandemic experience of cholera found its way into contemporary literature, particularly in the model of the specter. Through culturally and historically framed textual analyses of literary texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, George Eliot, H.G. Wells, Heinrich Heine, Ricarda Huch, and others as well as a variety of contemporary life writing documents, the study explores the multifarious intersections of lifeworld and literature. Within the methodological and theoretical framework of the Medical Humanities and Gothic Studies, it thus reveals genuine strategies for making the unspeakable speakable. By the use of epi- and pandemic experience as an example of a state of emergency, the study shows how closely scientific, political, social, and cultural discourses are interwoven, how they influence each other, and what role art and literature play in these processes of exchange. The Spectre of the Pandemic thus raises awareness of the interdependence of most diverse knowledge formations and is a plea for inter- and transdisciplinary thinking and research, especially in times of crisis. The present excerpt is a translated, abridged and slightly adapted version of the introduction of the study Das Gespenst der Pandemie: Politik und Poetik der Cholera in der Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts, originally published by frommann-holzboog publishing house.