This book explores a wide range of kinds of crises and the ways they have been written about in literature of various genres and time periods. It also emphasizes the artistry involved in the various works it examines.
Front Cover.
Half Title Page.
Title Page.
Copyright Page.
Contents.
About This Volume.
Why Study Premodern Pandemic Experience?.
1: Critical Contexts.
2: “Earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she”: Inheritance, Reproduction, and Plague in Romeo and Juliet.
3: Commentary on Plague and Disease in the Early and Later Modern Periods.
4: Greek Tragedy, Black Swans, and the Coronavirus: The Consolation of Theatre.
5: Learning in Wartime: Samuel Johnson and Spiritual Transcendence in The Vanity of Human Wishes.
6: Critical Readings.
7: Key Ancient Crises: Construction of Plot and the Story of the Trojan War in the Iliad.
8: Crises in Sophocles’s Antigone.
9: Crisis and Conspiracy in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
10: Charles Brockden Brown’s “The Man at Home”: Crisis, Isolation, and Narrative.
11: Apocalypse and Postapocalypse in Nineteenth-Century Literature.
12: Crises in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Especially Grampa’s Death.
13: Apocalypse and Postapocalypse in Fiction and Film, 1945–1970.
14: The Crisis of the Archives: Susan Howe’s “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time”.
15: Crises in Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad: The Dramatic Adaptation.
16: The Film Version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: A Survey of Reviews.
17: Crisis and Crises in Homer’s Iliad and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls.
18: Resources.
Additional Works on Literature in Times of Crisis.
