In Time Of Plague

Original essays by distinguished scholars from many disciplines examine the many ways in which diseases have been defined throughout the ages and how they, and their victims, are considered today. Included are chapters on responses to plague in early modern Europe, plagues and morality, AIDS and the tradition of homophobia, and pandemics as natural evolutionary phenomena. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Here is a small part of my soul I pulled out and shaped like this It is still bleeding, but only a little It won't mess your hands much, And you can wash them after. For years Hugo and Nebula award winning writer Jo Walton has been writing poems and posting them online, first on usenet, then on livejournal, more recently on Patreon. Some have been collected in chapbooks and in Starlings, but most of them have just stayed online. Here at last is a comprehensive collection of her poems from 1996-2020 with table of contents and an index of first lines, and arranged in thematic categories, Love Pain and Death, New Myths For Old Gold, Red As Blood, By Their Spaceships Ye Shall Know Them, Shakespeare, The News, The Turning Year, and Whimsy. Some of the poems are fantastical, others are about everyday life, or politics. If there's one thing that links Walton's very different work it's the quality of "where did that come from?" Here we have a poem about lions becoming extinct after being persecuted by martyrs, one about Henry V's conquest of Constantinople, alongside one about a skydiver friend who died and fell up into the sky. These poems, written over decades, are quirky, unpredictable, and have excellent scansion.

States of Plague examines Albert Camus’s novel as a palimpsest of pandemic life, an uncannily relevant account of the psychology and politics of a public health crisis. As one of the most discussed books of the COVID-19 crisis, Albert Camus’s classic novel The Plague has become a new kind of literary touchstone. Surrounded by terror and uncertainty, often separated from loved ones or unable to travel, readers sought answers within the pages of Camus’s 1947 tale about an Algerian city gripped by an epidemic. Many found in it a story about their own lives—a book to shed light on a global health crisis. In thirteen linked chapters told in alternating voices, Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris hold the past and present of The Plague in conversation, discovering how the novel has reached people in their current moment. Kaplan’s chapters explore the book’s tangled and vivid history, while Marris’s are drawn to the ecology of landscape and language. Through these pages, they find that their sense of Camus evolves under the force of a new reality, alongside the pressures of illness, recovery, concern, and care in their own lives. Along the way, Kaplan and Marris examine how the novel’s original allegory might resonate with a new generation of readers who have experienced a global pandemic. They describe how they learned to contemplate the skies of a plague spring, to examine the body politic and the politics of immunity. Both personal and eloquently written, States of Plague uncovers for us the mysterious way a novel can imagine the world during a crisis and draw back the veil on other possible futures.

This is a collection of original poems by Christopher Bursk. The poems are inspired by Vergil's Aeneid and deal with modern issues of love, loss, family, masculinity, and more. Many of the epigraphs are in Latin from the Aeneid and some are translated into English.

During the seventeenth century, England was beset by three epidemics of the bubonic plague, each outbreak claiming between a quarter and a third of the population of London and other urban centers. Surveying a wide range of responses to these epidemics—sermons, medical tracts, pious exhortations, satirical pamphlets, and political commentary—Plague Writing in Early Modern England brings to life the many and complex ways Londoners made sense of such unspeakable devastation. Ernest B. Gilman argues that the plague writing of the period attempted unsuccessfully to rationalize the catastrophic and that its failure to account for the plague as an instrument of divine justice fundamentally threatened the core of Christian belief. Gilman also trains his critical eye on the works of Jonson, Donne, Pepys, and Defoe, which, he posits, can be more fully understood when put into the context of this century-long project to “write out” the plague. Ultimately, Plague Writing in Early Modern England is more than a compendium of artifacts of a bygone era; it holds up a distant mirror to reflect our own condition in the age of AIDS, super viruses, multidrug resistant tuberculosis, and the hovering threat of a global flu pandemic.

Plague and Public Health in Early Modern Seville offers a reassessment of the impact of plague in the early modern era, presenting sixteenth-century Seville as a case study of how municipal officials and residents worked together to create a public health response that protected both individual and communal interests. Similar studies of plague during this period either dramatize the tragic consequences of the epidemic or concentrate on the tough "modern" public health interventions, such as quarantine, surveillance and isolation, and the laxness or strictness of their enforcement. Arguing for a redefinition of "public health" in the early modern era, this study chronicles a more restrained, humane, and balanced response to outbreaks in 1582 and 1599-1600 Seville, showing that city officials aimed to protect the population but also maintain trade and commerce in order to prevent economic disruption. Based on extensive primary sources held in the municipal archive of Seville, the work argues that a careful reading of the records shows a critical difference between how plague regulations were written and how they were enforced, a difference that reflects an unacknowledged process of negotiation aimed at preserving balance within the community. The book makes important contributions to the study of early modern city governance and to the historiography of epidemics more broadly. Kristy Wilson Bowers received her PhD from Indiana University and teaches in the History Department at Northern Illinois University.

Plague is both metaphor and physical presence. The poems in this volume, written between January and June of 2020, address the plagues of COVID-19; racism, police brutality; and political indifference, ineptness, and malfeasance. The poems offer the hope that the first plague has taught us about the good fruits of compassion and community and that the continuing nonviolent protests in the United States over the second plague, racism, will help birth a resurrection in the hearts, minds, and souls of all Americans, a new Easter. The twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth astutely said, "The pastor and his congregation should not imagine that they are a religious society that is fixated [only] on certain themes, but that they live in this world. We do indeed need, according to my old formulation, the Bible and the newspaper." With the poems in this volume, the author, newspaper in hand, reflects on events from January to early June 2020 and does so by integrating reflections on Scripture with current events.