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Asceticism, so it is argued in this volume, is a modern category. The ubiquitous cult of the body, of fitness and diet equally evokes the ongoing success of ascetic practices and beliefs. Nostalgic memories of hardship and discipline in the army, youth movements or boarding schools remain as present as the fashionable irritation with the presumed modern-day laziness. In the very texture of contemporary culture, age-old asceticism proves to be remarkably alive. Old ascetic forms were remoulded to serve modern desires for personal authenticity, an authenticity that disconnected asceticism in the course of the nineteenth century from two traditions that had underpinned it since classical antiquity: the public, republican austerity of antiquity and the private, religious asceticism of Christianity. Exploring various aspects such as the history of the body, of aesthetics, science, and social thought in several European countries (Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria and Belgium), the authors show that modern asceticism remains a deeply ambivalent category. Apart from self-realisation, classical and religious examples continue to haunt the ascetic mind.
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Modern Asceticism: A Historical Exploration
Evert Peeters, Kaat Wils and Leen Van Molle
PART I: CULT PLACES OF AUTHENTICITY
Chapter 1. The Performance of Redemption: Asceticism and Liberation in Belgian Lebensreform
Evert Peeters
Chapter 2. Asceticism and Pleasure in German Health Reform: Patients as Clients in Wilhelmine Sanatoria
Michael Hau
PART II: SOCIAL REGULATION OF PLEASURE
Chapter 3. Moving Images and the Popular Imagination: Visual Pleasure and Film Censorship in Comparative Perspective
Thomas J. Saunders
Chapter 4. 'The Wo that Is in Marriage': Abstinence in Practice and Principle in British Marriages, 1890s-1940s
Lesley A. Hall
Chapter 5. Ascetiscism in Modern Social Thought
Henk de Smaele
PART III: AESTHETICS AND DISCTINCTION
Chapter 6. Adolf Loos and the Doric Order
Wessel Krul
Chapter 7. Disguised Asceticism: The Promotion of Austerity in Interior Design during the Interwar Period in Flanders, Belgium
Sofie De Caigny
PART IV: THE LONELY PASSIONS OF SCIENCE
Chapter 8. The Revelation of a Modern Saint: Marie Curie's Scientific Asceticism and the Culture of Professionalised Science
Kaat Wils
Chapter 9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Tractatus and the Linguistic Turn in Modern Asceticism
Klass Berkel
PART V: DISCIPLINE IN THE AGE OF AFFLUENCE
Chapter 10. Necessity into Virtue: The Culture of Postwar Reconstruction in Western Europe between Asceticism and Anti-Asceticism
Marnix Beyen
Chapter 11. Modern Asceticism and Contemporary Body Culture
Julia Twigg
Notes on Contributors
Index
