Literary Representations of Pandemics, Epidemics and Pestilence ed. by Nishi Pulugurtha (review)

Reviewed by: Literary Representations of Pandemics, Epidemics and Pestilence ed. by Nishi Pulugurtha Jingxuan Yi Nishi Pulugurtha, ed. Literary Representations of Pandemics, Epidemics and Pestilence. Abingdon: Routledge, 2023. xii + 192 pp. The past four years have seen the worldwide outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and its tremendous impact on people's lives, health, and livelihood. This severe social and economic crisis has sparked renewed interest in literary narratives about disease, pestilence, and contagion. Literary Representations of Pandemics, Epidemics and Pestilence, edited by Nishi Pulugurtha, compiles essays on representation of human vulnerability and traumatic death related to epidemics. From the plagues that ravaged ancient Egypt to the pox that devastated medieval Europe, to Covid-19, humanity has always been afflicted by pestilence and pandemics. Among those who lived through and witnessed such crises there have been individuals who have recorded their experience, complete with sensory perceptions. While some have told sober facts and registered events as they occurred, others have produced emotionally charged texts. While moralists have tended to contemplate the source of horror, poets have distilled suffering. There was a time when to read accounts of the decimating Black Death in Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron (1353) or of the outbreak of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Katherine Anne Porter's short story "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" (1939) — scenes of human suffering and woe, quarantined houses, empty streets, closed down shops, overflowing cemeteries, and heroic doctors and nurses — was to enter a bizarre troubled world. Today, reading the same works elicits recognition and understanding. Apart from causing massive fear and uncertainty among communities, the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed flaws in human society and highlighted the resilience of the human spirit, illuminating social disparities in a new way. This collection of critical essays on pandemic literature discusses narratives as a means of recovering from trauma and loss, showing how these accounts of pandemics, throughout the centuries, give evidence of despair, rage, anxiety, fear, and hope. The selected works cover memory of numerous types of human experience, representing individual and collective memories of the plague, which would have been obfuscated by other social and cultural phenomena. These voices from history hold up a mirror to our knowledge of and responses to the current global crisis. The Covid-19 pandemic undermines human hubris and once again enhances reflection on an anthropocentric vision of nature. Literature is valorized as an effective medium for the socially marginalized and the neglected to challenge hegemonic discourses and to make their subdued voices heard. As Sipra Mukherjee points out, pandemics in most European and End Page 379 American novels serve as metaphors, signifying "points of crises" (17), through which humans are cautioned to reflect upon the shallowness of civilization. The epidemic as the cause of human misery opens up possibilities to break down or transcend existing mental barriers and question human destiny. The book's sixteen essays are grouped into five parts. The first part, "Memory and Contagion," probes the texts in which representations of disease resist the binary categorization between the physical and the spiritual, the traditional and the modern, the masculine and the feminine. For example, in "'Vernacular Realities' in Epidemic Literature," Mukherjee argues that the Indian stories of epidemic reject a unified interpretation following "any clear, and simplistic, trajectory of causality" (24). In "Pandemic and Manless Society," Goutam Karmakar contends that the "male plague" renders men "vulnerable diseased bodies" (47) subject to isolation and threatens to subvert the patriarchal power structure. The second part, "Uncanny Dilemmas," demonstrates how the representation of the epidemic involves not only the decay of the former monolithic assumptions but also the creation of a new order. For example, Riti Agarwala argues that individualism emerges as an important aspect of The Decameron, which challenges "traditional concepts of entities that constitute life" (60). In the following article, focusing on Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), Sarottama Majumdar points out that despite its dystopian tone, this novel celebrates the creative power of human imagination in the face of overwhelming crisis. The last man is regarded as "a triumphant Romantic trope" (70) rather than a record of submission to despair. The role of epidemics in enacting the duality of decay and...