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Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation

  • Book
  • © 2022

Overview

Editors:
  1. Sathyaraj Venkatesan

    1. Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, India

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  2. Antara Chatterjee

    1. Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, India

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  3. A. David Lewis

    1. School of Arts and Sciences, MCPHS University, Boston, USA

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  4. Brian Callender

    1. Biological Sciences Division, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA

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  • Covers a broad range of representations such as literature, cinema, comics, drama, and social media

  • Presents a multidisciplinary approach to historical epidemics such as black death, cholera, Influenza, AIDS

  • Provides detailed analyzes of literary and cultural responses to the COVID-19 pandemic

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Table of contents (16 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-x
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  2. Introduction

    • Sathyaraj Venkatesan, Antara Chatterjee, A. David Lewis, Brian Callender
    Pages 1-10

  3. Framing Pandemics/Epidemics

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 11-11
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    2. Epidemic Narrative: Two Paradigms

      • Dilip Kumar Das
      Pages 13-27

  4. Charting Medieval and Early Modern Pestilences

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 29-29
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    2. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a Postpandemic Text

      • Lorenz A. Hindrichsen
      Pages 31-48

    3. “The Invisible Operator”: Plague, Corruption, and Conspiracy in Renaissance Drama

      • Rebecca Welshman
      Pages 49-62

  5. Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Pandemics: Rupture and (Re)configurations of Community

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 63-63
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    2. Three Facets of the Literary Imagination of Cholera: Hysteria, Ridicule, and the Rise of Bacteriology

      • Aureo Lustosa Guerios
      Pages 65-79

    3. The Blue Death: Cholera and Reimagined Community in Nineteenth-Century Havana

      • Bethany M. Wade
      Pages 81-103

  7. Pandemics/Epidemics in Indian Literature

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 135-135
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    2. Spatial Pathologies: The Biopolitics of Disease, Death, and the Caste-Body in Ananthamurthy’s Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man

      • Gaana Jayagopalan
      Pages 137-150
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Keywords

About this book

This edited book analyses how artists, authors, and cultural practitioners have responded to and represented episodes of epidemics/pandemics through history. Covering a broad range of notable epidemics/pandemics (black death, cholera, Influenza, AIDS, Ebola, COVID-19), the chapters examine the cultural representations of epidemics and pandemics in different contexts, periods, languages, media, and genres. Interdisciplinary in nature and drawing on perspectives from medicine, literature, medical anthropology, philosophy of medicine, and cultural theory, the book investigates and emphasizes the urgent need to reflect on past catastrophes caused by such outbreaks. By delving into cultural history, it re-examines how societies and communities have responded in the past to species-threatening epidemics/pandemics. Sure to be of interest to lay readers as well as students and researchers, this work situates epidemics and pandemics outbreaks within the contexts of culture and narrative, and their complex and layered representation, commenting on intersections of contagion, culture, and community. It offers a cross-cultural, global, and comparative analysis of the trajectories, histories and responses to various epidemics/pandemics that impacted people worldwide.

Editors and Affiliations

  • Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, India

    Sathyaraj Venkatesan

  • Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, India

    Antara Chatterjee

  • School of Arts and Sciences, MCPHS University, Boston, USA

    A. David Lewis

  • Biological Sciences Division, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA

    Brian Callender

About the editors

Sathyaraj Venkatesan PhD is an Associate Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology (NIT), Tiruchirappalli, India. His research concentrates on health humanities, comics studies, and graphic medicine. He is the author of eight books and over ninety-five research publications that span American literature, health humanities, graphic medicine, film studies, and other literary and culture studies disciplines. His recent co-authored books are Metaphors of Mental Illness in Graphic Medicine (Routledge, 2021) and India Retold (Bloomsbury, 2021).


Antara Chatterjee PhD is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, (IISER), Bhopal, India. Her research interests include Indian writing in English, South Asian diasporic literatures, trauma, violence and cultural memory, medical and environmental humanities. She has received grants and fellowships from the University Grants Commission, India, the Charles Wallace India Trust, the Indian Council of Historical Research, and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India. She has publications in South Asian Review, Humanities, and in an edited collection of essays The Postcolonial Short Story published by Palgrave Macmillan. She has chapters forthcoming in edited collections to be published by Bloomsbury and Routledge. She is set to be the inaugural Strauss Fellow at the Cedars-Sinai Center for Medicine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, LA, USA, in summer 2022.


A. David Lewis PhD is the Eisner Award-nominated author of American Comics, Religion, and Literary Theory: The Superhero Afterlife as well as co-editor of both Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels and Muslim Superheroes: Comics, Islam, and Representation. Featured on numerous podcast and television programs, Dr. Lewis is currently program director for the MHS degree at the MCPHS University School of Arts & Sciences where his teaching and research focus on graphic medicine, specifically the depiction of cancer in comic books and graphic novels. Finally, he is the acclaimed author of such comics as The Lone and Level Sands and Kismet, Man of Fate.


Brian Callender M. D. is an Associate Professor of medicine at the University of Chicago. He is a faculty member of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics and co-organized the 2020-2021 lecture series, ethics and the COVID-19 pandemic: Medical, Social, and Political Issues. As a core faculty member of the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, he teaches health humanities courses, including: The Body in Medicine and the Performing Arts; Graphic Medicine: Concepts and Practice; The Art of Healing: Medical Aesthetics in Russia and the U.S.; Death Panels: Exploring Dying and Death through Comics; and The Narratives and Aesthetics of Contagion: Knowledge Formation and the COVID-19 Pandemic. He has also curated two exhibits at the University of Chicago’s Special Collections Research Center that examine the visual culture of medicine: Imaging/Imagining: The Body in Anatomical Representation and The Fetus in Utero: From Mystery to Social Media.


Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation

  • Editors: Sathyaraj Venkatesan, Antara Chatterjee, A. David Lewis, Brian Callender

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1296-2

  • Publisher: Springer Singapore

  • eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-19-1295-5Published: 19 May 2022

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-981-19-1298-6Published: 20 May 2023

  • eBook ISBN: 978-981-19-1296-2Published: 18 May 2022

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: X, 266

  • Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations, 14 illustrations in colour

  • Topics: Literary History, Bioethics, Public Health

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