Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation

✍ Scribed by Sathyaraj Venkatesan (editor), Antara Chatterjee (editor), A. David Lewis (editor), Brian Callender (editor)

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 2022
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 262
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Preface
Contents
About the Editors
1 Introduction
Layout of the Book
Works Cited
Part I Framing Pandemics/Epidemics
2 Epidemic Narrative: Two Paradigms
Introduction
Illness Narratives
The AIDS Narrative
Biomedical and Cosmological Paradigms
Emplotment, Chronotope, and the Significance of Epidemic
Conclusion
Bibliography
Part II Charting Medieval and Early Modern Pestilences
3 Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a Postpandemic Text
Postpandemic Chaucer
Framing the Postpandemic: The General Prologue
Carnivalesque Discourse: Conversation Among the Pilgrims
Suspect Bodies: The Summoner and The Cook
Monetizing Suffering: The Physician and The Pardoner
Postpandemic Care: The Franklin, The Parson, and The Host
References
4 “The Invisible Operator”: Plague, Corruption, and Conspiracy in Renaissance Drama
Introduction
Bibliography
Part III Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Pandemics: Rupture and (Re)configurations of Community
5 Three Facets of the Literary Imagination of Cholera: Hysteria, Ridicule, and the Rise of Bacteriology
Introduction
Cholera Symptoms
Hysteria: A Plague Worse Than Plague
Ridicule: A Laughable Crisis
Relief: The Protection of Bacteriology
Conclusion
Bibliography
6 The Blue Death: Cholera and Reimagined Community in Nineteenth-Century Havana
Representing Pandemic Cholera
Representing the Commercial City
Representing the Miasmatic City
Morality, Predisposition, and Medicine
Medicine, Politics, and Racial Insecurities
Racial Insecurity, Narrative Fiction, and The Boundaries of Community
Conclusion
Bibliography
Part IV The Spanish Flu and Its Afterlives
7 Reading Toronto’s Response to Spanish Influenza: The Globe and Daily Star Report on the 1918–20 Pandemic’s Second Wave
Introduction
Toronto in the 1910s
Initial Reporting on the Pandemic
Toronto’s MOH and Ontario’s CMO During the Second Wave
Reporting on the Deaths of Soldiers and Athletes
Reporting on Women’s Roles and Rights
Smallpox Leads to Changes
Conclusion
References
8 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
Introduction
Amnesia, Trauma, and Memory
Contagion, Community, and Politics
References
Part V Pandemics/Epidemics in Indian Literature
9 Spatial Pathologies: The Biopolitics of Disease, Death, and the Caste-Body in Ananthamurthy’s Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man
Introduction
Samskara: An Overview
Locating Autoimmunity Vis-À-Vis Caste Spaces
Thematic 1: Physical Spaces and Caste Insularities—Agrahara and Its Biomedical and Cosmological Corruption
Thematic 2: Spatial Pathologies of the Caste-Body
Autoimmunity and Biopolitics of the Social Body
Conclusion
References
Part VI Millennial Pandemics: AIDS, COVID-19 and Beyond
10 “No Country for the Infirm”: Reading Angels in America During COVID-19
Introduction
Equality and Egalitarianism Through Religious Identity
Thanatophobia as a Side Effect of Kohls’ American Values
Conclusion
References
11 “Bleeding” into Reality: Popular Representations of Ebola and the 2013–2016 West African Ebola Epidemic
Introduction
Pools of Blood: Ebola in Popular Media
A Mysterious Disease: Diagnosing Ebola
Conclusion: Pandemic Fiction, Pandemic Reality
References
12 Wearing Masks: Living and Coping “WITH CORONA” in Japan Under the Pandemic
Introduction
The Hyogo Prefectural Yokoo Emergency Hospital Exhibition and “WITH CORONA”
“With Corona” as a Method of Mitigation
Experiencing the Number of Cases
Body and Vulnerability
The End of “With Corona”
References
13  <3 I Am Tracy: Meme Culture, Coping, and Community During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Introduction
Meming the Pandemic
Catharsis and Control
Maintaining and Building Bonds
Conclusion
References
14 Comics, Cartoons, and Vignettes: The Graphic Narratives of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Introduction
Analysis of Graphic Materials
Classification and First Impressions
The Virus
Death
Confinement
“The Curve”
Healthcare Professionals
Patients Suffering
Face Masks
Vaccines
Seasonal Themes
Conclusion
Part VII Health Inequity in the Time of COVID-19
15 “Their Lives Just Do not Matter?”: “Racing” COVID-19 and Graphic Medicine
BIPOC: An Introduction
Graphic Medicine: An Introduction
Overview of COVID-19 Comics
“Racing” COVID-19
Intersectionality of Precarity
Social Distancing En“force”ment
Native Indian Realities
Implications
References
16 Caste in Epidemics in India: A Historical and Literary Reading
Introduction
Caste in Nineteenth-Century Epidemics in India: Bubonic Plague and Cholera
Caste and COVID-19
Cast(e)ing Epidemics in Literary Representations
Conclusion
References