ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|37 pages
Memory and Contagion
chapter 1|15 pages
“Vernacular Realities” in Epidemic Literature
chapter 3|9 pages
Pandemic and Man-less Society
part II|40 pages
Uncanny Dilemmas
part III|32 pages
Moving Between Language and Media
chapter 8|12 pages
“It Mattered Not from Whence it Came; But All Agreed it Was Come …”
part IV|41 pages
Fear, Disaster and Dystopia
chapter 11|11 pages
Pestilence, Death, Fear and a Testimony of Female Outrage
chapter 13|10 pages
Pandemic Fear
part V|22 pages
COVID-19, Public Health and Social Justice