Literary Representations of Pandemics, Epidemics and Pestilence

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. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Contents List of Contributors Introduction I Memory and Contagion 1 “Vernacular Realities” in Epidemic Literature: Reading Fakir Mohan Senapati’s “Rebati” and Suryakant Tripathi Nirala’s Kulli Bhaat 2 The Trauma and the Triumph: Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” 3 Pandemic and Man-less Society: Problematizing Gender, Sex and Sexuality in Christina Sweeney-Baird’s The End of Men II Uncanny Dilemmas 4 The Decameron: Re-reading the Uncanny Riddle of Plague 5 Mary Shelley’s The Last Man: Dystopian Fiction and Pandemics 6 Epidemic Anxiety and Narrative Aesthetics in Sarat Chandra’s Palli Samaj and Pandit Mashay 7 Albert Camus’ Rejoinder to the Absent God and the Absurdity of Existence in The Plague III Moving Between Language and Media 8 “It Mattered Not from Whence it Came; But All Agreed it Was Come . . .”: Plague Narratives as Narratives of Media and of Foreignness 9 Forgetting Difference: The Plague in Hindi and Urdu Literature 10 The Periwig Maker and Defoe: A Déjà vu Upon the Present IV Fear, Disaster and Dystopia 11 Pestilence, Death, Fear and a Testimony of Female Outrage: The 1897 Bombay Plague in the Writing of Pandita Ramabai 12 Pandemic as a Disaster: Narratives of Suffering and “Risk” in Twilight in Delhi 13 Pandemic Fear: Death and the Ruin of Civilization in Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague 14 Pandemic and the End of the World in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake V COVID-19, Public Health and Social Justice 15 Power and the Pandemic Through Two Gothic Tropes 16 Following the Dead: Digital Obituaries as Rituals of Selective Remembrance During the COVID-19 Pandemic Index