"In Some Strange Way Altered": Miasmic Crises and Pandemic Fictions

Questions of memory and forgetting are central to pandemic literary representation. I analyze influenza and COVID-related literature by Virginia Woolf, Claudia Rankine, and others, bringing this analysis together with personal reflections. The essay posits three imagery structures—miasma, competitive forgetting, and malignant symbiosis—that help illustrate the absent-present quality of these pandemics. I investigate how the literature represents pandemics as miasmic crises, ones that align (and overlap) with other vast crises, such as discrimination and ecological destruction, that are both everywhere and yet often hidden in plain sight.