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Land of Milk and Paper Money: Swiss Tourism and High Literature at the Turn of the Century

| Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (1924) marks the end of an era and the pinnacle of literature on alpine tourism. Since Thomas Cook’s first package holiday to Switzerland in the mid-nineteenth century especially, the European middle and upper classes were drawn to the Alps: in summer and in winter; for climbing and skiing, health cures and grand hotels, and a very sociable sort of rural retreat. Holiday reading accompanied passengers on the way there, and helped them to pass time spent on a veranda looking out at a rainy day. Books were often written by guests themselves (sometimes in exchange for free board). Publishers soon moved from travel guides to literary landscapes. A lending library at Davos became the lifestyle business of an entrepreneurial tuberculosis patient. Not so much word of mouth as the printed word was now the best marketing strategy – selling weeks of leisurely book-browsing abroad. In this talk, Seán Williams examines world-renowned Swiss hospitality around 1900: the cosmopolitan resort, the boutique hotel off the beaten track, and the commercialization of counter-culture at Monte Verità. He traces how the routes to and from these tourist topographies were built in the mind and on the page, literally changing the scenery and the literary canon forever. |