Literary Representations of Pandemics, Epidemics and Pestilence

Literary Representations of Pandemics, Epidemics and Pestilence PDF Author: Nishi Pulugurtha
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000810801
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Disease, pestilence and contagion have been an integral component of human lives and stories. This book explores the articulations and representations of the vulnerability of life or the trauma of death in literature about epidemics both from India and around the world. This book critically engages with stories and narratives that have dealt with pandemics or epidemics in the past and in contemporary times to see how these texts present human life coming to terms with upheaval, fear and uncertainty. Set in various places and times, the literature examined in this book explores the themes of human suffering and resilience, inequality, corruption, the ruin of civilizations and the rituals of grief and remembrance. The chapters in this volume cover a wide spatio-temporal trajectory analysing the writings of Fakir Mohan Senapati and Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, Jack London, Albert Camus, Margaret Atwood, Sarat Chand, Pandita Ramabai and Christina Sweeney-Baird, among others. It gives readers a glimpse into both grounded and fantastical realities where disease and death clash with human psychology and where philosophy, politics and social values are critiqued and problematized. This book will be of interest to students of English literature, social science, gender studies, cultural studies, psychology, society, politics and philosophy. General readers too will find this exciting as it covers authors from across the world.

Literary Representations of Pandemics, Epidemics and Pestilence

Literary Representations of Pandemics, Epidemics and Pestilence PDF Author: Nishi Pulugurtha
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000810801
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Get Book

Book Description
Disease, pestilence and contagion have been an integral component of human lives and stories. This book explores the articulations and representations of the vulnerability of life or the trauma of death in literature about epidemics both from India and around the world. This book critically engages with stories and narratives that have dealt with pandemics or epidemics in the past and in contemporary times to see how these texts present human life coming to terms with upheaval, fear and uncertainty. Set in various places and times, the literature examined in this book explores the themes of human suffering and resilience, inequality, corruption, the ruin of civilizations and the rituals of grief and remembrance. The chapters in this volume cover a wide spatio-temporal trajectory analysing the writings of Fakir Mohan Senapati and Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, Jack London, Albert Camus, Margaret Atwood, Sarat Chand, Pandita Ramabai and Christina Sweeney-Baird, among others. It gives readers a glimpse into both grounded and fantastical realities where disease and death clash with human psychology and where philosophy, politics and social values are critiqued and problematized. This book will be of interest to students of English literature, social science, gender studies, cultural studies, psychology, society, politics and philosophy. General readers too will find this exciting as it covers authors from across the world.

Pandemic Literature

Pandemic Literature PDF Author: DR. SMEETAA A. WANJARRI
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788171922130
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
As is commonly understood, a pandemic is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has spread across a large region, for instance, multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of people. Throughout human history, there have been a number of pandemics of diseases such as plague, smallpox, and tuberculosis. The most fatal pandemic in recorded history was the Black Death, which killed an estimated 75 200 million people in the 14th century. The term 'Pandemic' was not used yet but was used for later pandemics including the 1918 influenza pandemic. Current pandemics include Coronavirus disease COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) and HIV/AIDS. The Covid-19 pandemic is an unprecedented event in human history. Never before has human existence been so consumed by a single disease, bringing life to a halt for months on end and forcing human beings to question their future and ponder deeply over their own mortality. Pandemics have been the theme of many literary works, penned by different celebrated authors. This book brings to fore the various pandemics as the theme/plot of popular books.This book would be of immense interest to faculty, students and research scholars of English Literature and even to a general reader interested in the subject of 'Pandemic Literature'.

The Plague Years

The Plague Years PDF Author: Michael Titlestad
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000631842
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
The Plague Years collects scholarly and essayistic reflections on literary, visual, and sonic representations of the COVID-19 and other pandemics. These are placed alongside poetry and short fiction written in the first two years of quarantine or isolation. This range expresses the intellectual and imaginative struggle and ingenuity entailed in coming to terms with the rampant spread of disease and its emotional, cultural, and political consequences. The contributions are from diverse contexts: Africa (from Egypt to South Africa), China, Japan, the US, and Scandinavia. They consider some of the array of contemporary engagements: poems translated from Mandarin about the traumas of the frontline, Chinese calligraphic poetry printed on cartons of PPE, comments on the literary history of representing epidemics and pandemics, political analyses of the post-truth present, and the role of life-writing and gaming in an interrupted world. Given the generative and creative obliquity of many of its parts, this collection shifts how one thinks about the diseased present and the archival pasts on which it draws. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of English Studies in Africa.

Plague, Pestilence and Pandemic: Voices from History

Plague, Pestilence and Pandemic: Voices from History PDF Author: Peter Furtado
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 0500776474
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
An eye-opening anthology from the bestselling editor of Histories of Nations, exploring how people around the globe have suffered and survived during plague and pandemic, from the ancient world to the present. Plague, pestilence, and pandemics have been a part of the human story from the beginning and have been reflected in art and writing at every turn. Humankind has always struggled with illness; and the experiences of different cities and countries have been compared and connected for thousands of years. Many great authors have published their eyewitness accounts and survivor stories of the great contagions of the past. When the great Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta visited Damascus in 1348 during the great plague, which went on to kill half of the population, he wrote about everything he saw. He reported, "God lightened their affliction; for the number of deaths in a single day at Damascus did not attain 2,000, while in Cairo it reached the figure of 24,000 a day." From the plagues of ancient Egypt recorded in Genesis to those like the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the Middle Ages, and from the Spanish flu of 1918 to the Covid-19 pandemic in our own century, this anthology contains fascinating accounts. Editor Peter Furtado places the human experience at the center of these stories, understanding that the way people have responded to disease crises over the centuries holds up a mirror to our own actions and experiences. Plague, Pestilence and Pandemic includes writing from around the world and highlights the shared emotional responses to pandemics: from rage, despair, dark humor, and heartbreak, to finally, hope that it may all be over. By connecting these moments in history, this book places our own reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic within the longer human story.

States of Plague

States of Plague PDF Author: Alice Kaplan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226815544
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
States of Plague examines Albert Camus’s novel as a palimpsest of pandemic life, an uncannily relevant account of the psychology and politics of a public health crisis. As one of the most discussed books of the COVID-19 crisis, Albert Camus’s classic novel The Plague has become a new kind of literary touchstone. Surrounded by terror and uncertainty, often separated from loved ones or unable to travel, readers sought answers within the pages of Camus’s 1947 tale about an Algerian city gripped by an epidemic. Many found in it a story about their own lives—a book to shed light on a global health crisis. In thirteen linked chapters told in alternating voices, Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris hold the past and present of The Plague in conversation, discovering how the novel has reached people in their current moment. Kaplan’s chapters explore the book’s tangled and vivid history, while Marris’s are drawn to the ecology of landscape and language. Through these pages, they find that their sense of Camus evolves under the force of a new reality, alongside the pressures of illness, recovery, concern, and care in their own lives. Along the way, Kaplan and Marris examine how the novel’s original allegory might resonate with a new generation of readers who have experienced a global pandemic. They describe how they learned to contemplate the skies of a plague spring, to examine the body politic and the politics of immunity. Both personal and eloquently written, States of Plague uncovers for us the mysterious way a novel can imagine the world during a crisis and draw back the veil on other possible futures.

Epidemics and Ideas

Epidemics and Ideas PDF Author: Terence Ranger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521558310
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
From plague to AIDS, epidemics have been the most spectacular diseases to afflict human societies. This volume examines the way in which these great crises have influenced ideas, how they have helped to shape theological, political and social thought, and how they have been interpreted and understood in the intellectual context of their time.

Encyclopedia of Pestilence, Pandemics, and Plagues [2 volumes]

Encyclopedia of Pestilence, Pandemics, and Plagues [2 volumes] PDF Author: Joseph P. Byrne
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1573569593
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 917

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Book Description
Editor Joseph P. Byrne, together with an advisory board of specialists and over 100 scholars, research scientists, and medical practitioners from 13 countries, has produced a uniquely interdisciplinary treatment of the ways in which diseases pestilence, and plagues have affected human life. From the Athenian flu pandemic to the Black Death to AIDS, this extensive two-volume set offers a sociocultural, historical, and medical look at infectious diseases and their place in human history from Neolithic times to the present. Nearly 300 entries cover individual diseases (such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, Ebola, and SARS); major epidemics (such as the Black Death, 16th-century syphilis, cholera in the nineteenth century, and the Spanish Flu of 1918-19); environmental factors (such as ecology, travel, poverty, wealth, slavery, and war); and historical and cultural effects of disease (such as the relationship of Romanticism to Tuberculosis, the closing of London theaters during plague epidemics, and the effect of venereal disease on social reform). Primary source sidebars, over 70 illustrations, a glossary, and an extensive print and nonprint bibliography round out the work.

The First Last Man

The First Last Man PDF Author: Eileen M. Hunt
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812298616
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Beyond her most famous creation—the nightmarish vision of Frankenstein’s Creature—Mary Shelley’s most enduring influence on politics, literature, and art perhaps stems from the legacy of her lesser-known novel about the near-extinction of the human species through war, disease, and corruption. This novel, The Last Man (1826), gives us the iconic image of a heroic survivor who narrates the history of an apocalyptic disaster in order to save humanity—if not as a species, then at least as the practice of compassion or humaneness. In visual and musical arts from 1826 to the present, this postapocalyptic figure has transmogrified from the “last man” into the globally familiar filmic images of the “invisible man” and the “final girl.” Reading Shelley’s work against the background of epidemic literature and political thought from ancient Greece to Covid-19, Eileen M. Hunt reveals how Shelley’s postapocalyptic imagination has shaped science fiction and dystopian writing from H. G. Wells, M. P. Shiel, and George Orwell to Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, and Emily St. John Mandel. Through archival research into Shelley’s personal journals and other writings, Hunt unearths Shelley’s ruminations on her own personal experiences of loss, including the death of young children in her family to disease and the drowning of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley’s grief drove her to intensive study of Greek tragedy, through which she developed the thinking about plague, conflict, and collective responsibility that later emerges in her fiction. From her readings of classic works of plague literature to her own translation of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, and from her authorship of the first major modern pandemic novel to her continued influence on contemporary popular culture, Shelley gave rise to a tradition of postapocalyptic thought that asks a question that the Covid-19 pandemic has made newly urgent for many: What do humans do after disaster?

Epidemics in the Modern World

Epidemics in the Modern World PDF Author: Joann P. Krieg
Publisher: Twayne Pub
ISBN: 9780805788594
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
"Today, AIDS challenges the hope of many Americans that geographical distance will provide immunity. As Krieg demonstrates, new literature by Larry Kramer, Paul Monette, and Susan Sontag speaks with increasing daring about the once-taboo subject of epidemics and their impact on national myths as well as on individual lives."--BOOK JACKET.

Armies of Pestilence

Armies of Pestilence PDF Author: R. S. Bray
Publisher: Lutterworth Press
ISBN:
Category : Diseases
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Disease has had a marked effect on history in various ways. Only in recent years have historians begun to study the subject, and this book offers both a contribution to this area of research and an evaluation of other literature on the impact of pandemics on human history.