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Epidemic Narrative: Two Paradigms -- Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a Postpandemic Text -- “The Invisible Operator”: Plague, Corruption and Conspiracy in Renaissance Drama -- Three Facets of the Literary Imagination of Cholera: Hysteria, Ridicule, and the Rise of Bacteriology, 1830-1900 -- The Blue Death: Cholera and Reimagined Community in Nineteenth-century Havana -- Reading Toronto’s Response to Spanish Influenza: The Globe and Daily Star Report on the 1918-20 Pandemic’s Second Wave -- Outbreak Narratives of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic: Contagion, Community, and Politics in Myla Goldberg’s Wickett’s Remedy and Thomas Mullen’s The Last Town on Earth -- Spatial Pathologies: The Biopolitics of Disease, Death, and the Caste-body in Ananthamurthy’s Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man -- “No Country for the Infirm”: Reading Angels in America During COVID-19 -- “Bleeding” into Reality: Popular Representations of Ebola and the 2013-2016 Ebola Epidemic -- Wearing Masks: Living and Coping “WITH CORONA” in Japan under the Pandemic -- <3 I AM TRACY: Meme Culture, Coping, and Community during the COVID-19 Pandemic -- Comics, Cartoons, and Vignettes: The Graphic Narratives of the COVID- 19 Pandemic -- “their lives just don’t matter?”: “Racing” COVID-19 and Graphic Medicine -- Caste in Epidemics in India: A Historical and Literary Reading. 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.
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