Contexts: modernity, hygiene, and contagion

Hopkins, D. and Persson, D. (2023) Contexts: modernity, hygiene, and contagion. In: Hopkins, D. and Persson, D. (eds.) Contagion, Hygiene, and the European Avant-Garde. Series: Routledge research in art history. Routeldge (Taylor & Francis): New York, NY, pp. 3-34. ISBN 9781003309000 (doi: 10.4324/9781003309000-2)

Abstract

This chapter introduces the interdisciplinary context surrounding issues of hygiene and contagion within European modernity c. 1880–1945. Fleshing out the complex web of political, ideological, cultural, and social ambitions, as well as anxieties, informing these hygienic tropes and the accompanying matrix of motifs – for example, infection, bacteria, microbes, germs, bacilli, contamination, and transmission – this chapter situates such issues within a conflicted space where sober observation and paranoid projections are entangled; a space that is, at once, proudly guided by the ideals of rationality and objectivity and, at the very same time, a fertile site of projection for all kinds of anguished fears – real and imagined. Such paradoxical duality mirrors that of modernity itself, experienced as a simultaneous promise of regeneration and as a menacing threat of degeneration. In this way, this chapter sets out a framework – historical as well as theoretical – for the exploration of how and to what critical effect these motifs of hygiene and contagion, and the charged currencies they carried in culture, were mobilised, repurposed, and subversively exploited to critical ends by the European avant-garde, as manifested across various media between c. 1880 and the Second World War.

• Item Type: Book Sections
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Persson, Miss Disa and Hopkins, Professor David
• Authors: Hopkins, D., and Persson, D.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Culture and Creative Arts
• Publisher: Routeldge (Taylor & Francis)
• ISBN: 9781003309000

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