CONTAGIOUS DISEASES AND ITS REFLECTION IN LITERATURE (original) (raw)
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Over time outbreaks of infectious diseases have ravaged humanity and sometimes even changed the course of history. Pandemics are massive outbreaks of common or emergent contagious diseases, such as the Black Death, leprosy, the Spanish Flu, Ebola, HIV/AIDS, or the worldwide spread now Covid-19. The current pandemic situation has had a noticeable impact on daily life across the globe, and is expected to have variable consequences for future societies. In other words, as Snowden argues, infectious diseases "are as important to understanding societal development as economic crises, wars, revolutions, and demographic change" (Snowden 2019: 15). Epidemics and pandemics have helped us to shape our cultural values and our political practices. Their impact can be examined not only in terms of individual life, but also in terms of religion, the arts and modern medicine. Literature has represented communities suffering from contagion since ancient times. Beginning with Homer's Iliad, which starts with a reference to a plague striking the Greek army at Troy, there are numerous examples of contagion fables (plagues, epidemics, infectious diseases, etc.) in the European literary canon. Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, written in the late 1340s and early 1350s, Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), Jack London's The Scarlet Plague (1912) and Albert Camus' La Peste (1947) are among the most outstanding examples. Pandemics have been depicted in various literary genres such as poetry, prose, theatrical plays, biography, memoir, autobiography, letters, fable etc., and span a great range of non-literary texts as well. In this sense, each pandemic narration conveys knowledge and has its own set of figurations (Charon 2006: 9). This issue aims to contribute to the study of pandemic poetics in Western literary texts of the 20 th and 21 st centuries as well as enrich our critical discussion about contemporary pandemics. Pandemics are represented as life patterns, either as phenomena or metaphors of specific individuals or social situations. Contagion can be broadly characterised as any kind of influence that threatens the agentive control of our health, behaviour, emotions and
The Saga of Pandemics through the Literary Lens
Nusantara Journal of Behavioral and Social Sciences
Disease, illness and death have been a human being’s constant companion right from the dawn of civilization and Pandemics are a part of this fatal manifestation which has been witnessed century upon century, successfully wreaking havoc upon the unsuspecting mankind. A pandemic (from Greek - pan, meaning "all" and demos meaning "people") is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has spread across a large region, spreading through continents and killing with impunity as it spreads. Throughout human history, there have been a number of pandemics of diseases such as smallpox and tuberculosis. The most fatal pandemic in recorded history was the Black Death (also known as The Plague), which killed an estimated 75–200 million people in the 14th century. Other notable pandemics include the 1918 pandemic, the Spanish influenza (Spanish flu). The current pandemics include Covid19 and HIV AIDS. The history of pandemic has been recorded meticulously by playwrights, noveli...
What Literature Tells Us about the Pandemic
Journal of Critical Studies in Language and Literature, 2020
Literature can play an important role in shaping our responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. It can offer us significant insights into how individuals treated the trauma of pandemics in the past, and how to survive in a situation beyond our control. Considering the changes and challenges that the coronavirus might bring for us, we should know that the world we are living in today is shaped by the biological crisis of the past. This understanding can help us deal with the challenges in the current pandemic situation. Literature can show us how the crisis has affected the lives of infected individuals. By exploring the theme of disease and pandemic, which is consistent and well-established in literature (Cooke, 2009), we come across a number of literary works dealing with plagues, epidemics and other forms of biological crises. Among the prominent examples of pandemic literature is Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947), narrating the story of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran....
On Pandemic Literature, 2020
This is an unpublished paper "On Pandemic Literature." Has a brief introduction. Reference to Pandemics in Indian , English, European and Cameroonian Literatures. The final part refers to the articles published in Tamil newspaper "Dinamani" and also messages received through Short Messaging Service (SMS). Refernces used complete the paper.
Literature has always been the strongest medium to express the nerve of social, political and historical forces since time immemorial. Be it the time of political crisis, economic upheaval or pandemic, literature has always tried to provide soothing balm to the bruised bosoms of humanity. An artist is the most helpless and the most powerful being on this blighted planet of ours. Physically he/she can't do anything but his/her written words on pages can create miracles. Life is not worth living, literature makes it worth living with the coating of imagination. That's why imagination is far better than knowledge simply because the world of knowledge is limited but the world of literature encompasses everything. A good piece of literature can transport us into a different world where there is no pain, no problem, no torture and no death. The present paper shows haw literature can sustain us even in the most critical time of the pandemic. It deals with two texts-The Plague by Albert Camus and Years of Wonder by Geraldine Brooks. Both the books show how life keeps going even in the toughest situations, evil may be omnipresent but it cannot annihilate humanity completely.
The Human Struggle against Diseases in Literature: Perceptions and Attitudes
Epidemics have been a part of world literature whether in the form of a plague or an outbreak with catastrophic consequences at personal and socio-economic levels. Boccaccio’s Decameron, Defoe’s The Journal of the Plague Year are considered some of the pioneer works which deal with epidemics. In the 19th and 20th century, widespread diseases continued to garner the attention of the authors and readers as serious illnesses ravaged human populations across the globe. In my presentation, I will investigate various human reactions in the face of death and widespread illnesses in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912), and Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar’s Hakka Sığındık (1919). As Susan Sontag studies the impact of the epidemics or serious diseases on human mind in her book titled Illness as Metaphor (1978), she puts forward the idea that most people are inclined to form punitive or sentimental fantasies in relation to being afflicted with a disease. Rather than investigating the physical effects of the illnesses, Sontag prefers to look into the meanings of these diseases as metaphors. I will be using Sontag’s method to explore the metaphoric meanings and receptions of widespread diseases and death in three different literary texts from world literature written in the 19th and 20th century
Divergent stories? Narrating ancient and current reactions to pandemics
Horitzó. Revista de ciències de la religió 5, 2024, pp. 67-79, 2024
Although this recent COVID virus is new, it is well known that this pandemic, in its medical characteristics, in its impact on the population and even in its social and economic repercussions, is nothing new. There is a long tradition of previous pandemics that have affected Western culture and have left literary footprints over the centuries. Pandemics generally share common features: the description of the symptoms, the response of the authorities, even the lockdown of the population, are recurring, and help us to see the current situation with some perspective. However, despite the similarities in the way illness has been metaphorized over the centuries, the divergences are particularly striking: while in ancient and medieval literary accounts illness is seen, in a metaphorical reading, as a moral, social and natural disorder as a whole, and the reaction of the majority of society is always a moral upheaval that leads to the loss of religious and ethical values, in current accounts, the media narrative emphasises shared feelings, popular gestures, and hopeful mimetism that have occurred all over the world. As a result, our civic values and religious belief systems, far from weakening, have been even strengthened. In order to clearly delineate an area for analysis, I will mainly focus on the social reactions to the pandemics described by Thucydides (5th century BC) and by Procopius of Caesarea (6th century AD) and contrast them with social reactions during the current pandemic, especially through media narratives such as news reports and political slogans. I will try to establish the devices in constructing of a story about the pandemic in each cultural context, and to illustrate how the ancient metaphors can be used to better understand the collective story of the current pandemic.