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"Epidemics Fiction"
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October birds : a novel about pandemic influenza, infection control, and first responders
En route to a conference, a physician from Jakarta boards a plane to the US. He does not know he is the index patient for the next global influenza pandemic. From this catalyst, thousands of people will get sick, hundreds of people will die. October Birds follows the healthcare and emergency management responders in the town of Dalton, Texas as they cope with the unfolding pandemic. Dr. Eliza Gordon, Chief Epidemiologist for the city struggles to control the outbreak and be a mother. Infectious disease specialist Dr. Ben Cromwell tries to maintain control of the increasing numbers of patients at Memorial Hospital, while Memorial's infection control specialist fights to limit the spread of the disease to the healthcare workers and the other patients. Dalton's emergency manager copes with an ever increasing logistical nightmare, and the incident commander tries to hold everything together. Meanwhile a currendera in the town searches for a cure. October Birds is grounded in real-life public health practice, sociological research, and emergency management. It is a/r/tographical research, sociological inquiry within the science/art intersection. October Birds is more than a story it is also a sociological theory of community-level response to health threats. This novel can be read as a supplementary text in a number of disciplines, including sociology, nursing, public health, health studies, emergency management, and psychology, and can be used in qualitative research methods courses as an example of arts-based research.
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Social Responses to Epidemics Depicted by Cinema
Films illustrate 2 ways that epidemics can affect societies: fear leading to a breakdown in sociability and fear stimulating preservation of tightly held social norms. The first response is often informed by concern over perceived moral failings within society, the second response by the application of arbitrary or excessive controls from outside the community.
Journal Article
Infection and Insignificance: Pandemic Narratives in the Age of the Anthropocene
Pandemic fiction emerges as a crucial narrative space that dramatises the ontological ruptures and epistemic uncertainties defining the Anthropocene. Speculative and dystopian texts, such as Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1994), Albert Camus's The Plague (1991), Stephen King's The Stand (1978), and H. P. Lovecraft's fiction, depict contagion as a force that unsettles humanist frameworks and exposes the fragility of anthropocentric certainties. In these fictions, Lovecraftian \"cosmicism\" evokes a universe where disease functions not as a moral allegory but as an existential force. It is marked by indifference that challenges the concept of human exceptionalism. Pandemics in literature act as ontological solvents, as posthumanist theory posits, they dissolve boundaries between self and other, life and non-life, narrative, and chaos. While Lovecraft's cosmic dread emphasises insignificance and epistemic collapse, Camus introduces a counterpoint through absurdist ethics rooted in action and solidarity. Shelley's melancholic solitude and King's mythic apocalypticism further expand the affective and philosophical range of pandemic fiction. These texts construct a speculative mode attuned to the Anthropocene. They decentre the human and foreground entanglement, entropy, and existential precarity. Ultimately, pandemic fiction emerges as a literary form uniquely equipped to probe the anxieties of a world where survival itself no longer affirms meaning, but instead reveals the fragile fictions upon which human identity depends.
Journal Article
Skin
A strange virus is sweeping the globe. Humans have become allergic to one another. Simply standing next to somebody could be a death sentence. A kiss could be fatal. Angela is a woman trying to get by in this bewildering new world. Though she still lives with her husband and children, they lead separate lives. Confined to their rooms, they communicate via their computers and phones. In some ways, very little has changed. That is, until she spots a mysterious stranger walking through town without even a face mask for protection. A man, it seems, immune to this disease. A man unlike anyone else she knows. A man it might just be safe to touch...
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Almodóvar and la movida in El Ministerio del Tiempo: Queering or Pinkwashing the Spanish Democratic Transition?
This article examines the fictional renderings of Pedro Almódovar and la movida in the Spanish TV series El Ministerio del Tiempo (2015–2020). First, I analyze how El Ministerio champions the democratic transition as a period that set the foundations for a modern pluralistic Spain. Then, I examine how the series incorporates Almodóvar's Laberinto de pasiones (1982) into its story as a means of stressing the vital contribution of the underground scene to the renewal of post-Franco culture. I focus on El Ministerio 's portrayal of drag performances and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, highlighting the restaging of one of Almodóvar's earliest and most daring films, and thus showing how the series adjusts an emblematic example of counterculture to hegemonic accounts of the transition. Ultimately, I argue that El Ministerio assimilates sexual diversity and counterculture into a teleological rereading of Spanish history that celebrates the transition as the ultimate stage of individual freedom and national reconciliation. Abstract: This article examines the fictional renderings of Pedro Almódovar and la Movida in the Spanish TV series El Ministerio del Tiempo (2015–2020). First, I analyze how El Ministerio draws upon time travel and speculative fiction to champion the democratic transition as a period that set the foundations for a modern pluralistic Spain. Then, I examine how the series incorporates Almodóvar's Laberinto de pasiones (1982) into its story, recreating its narrative and aesthetic cues as a means of stressing the vital contribution of the underground scene to the post-Franco cultural renovation. I particularly focus on El Ministerio 's portrayal of drag performances and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, highlighting that it restages one of Almodóvar's earliest and most daring films through the lens of his later canonization as the quintessential Spanish auteur. In this way, I show that the series adjusts an emblematic example of counterculture to hegemonic accounts of the transition, realigning Laberinto with the goal of institutionalizing democratic culture and consolidating the nowadays much-questioned logic of consensus that guided state cultural policies during the 1980s. Ultimately, I argue that El Ministerio reintegrates sexual diversity and counterculture into a teleological rereading of Spanish history that celebrates the transition as the ultimate stage of individual freedom and national reconciliation.
Journal Article
City of ash and red : a novel
\"For fans of J. G. Ballard and early Ian McEwan, a tense psychological thriller and Kafkaesque parable by the author of The Hole--called 'an airtight masterpiece' by the Korean Economic Daily. Distinguished for his talents as a rat killer, the nameless protagonist of Hye-young Pyun's City of Ash and Red is sent by the extermination company he works for on an extended assignment in C, a country descending into chaos and paranoia, swept by a contagious disease, and flooded with trash. No sooner does he disembark than he is whisked away by quarantine officials and detained overnight. Isolated and forgotten, he realizes that he is stranded with no means of contacting the outside world. Still worse, when he finally manages to reach an old friend, he is told that his ex-wife's body was found in his apartment and he is the prime suspect. Barely managing to escape arrest, he must struggle to survive in the streets of this foreign city gripped with fear of contamination and reestablish contact with his company and friends in order to clear his reputation. But as the man's former life slips further and further from his grasp, and he looks back on his time with his wife, it becomes clear that he may not quite be who he seems. From the bestselling author of The Hole, City of Ash and Red is an apocalyptic account of the destructive impact of fear and paranoia on people's lives as well as a haunting novel about a man's loss of himself and his humanity\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Prayer Had Broken Out: Pandemics, Capitalism, and Religious Extremism in Recent Apocalyptic Fiction
Recent apocalyptic fiction suggests that epidemics can catalyze religious fanaticism, highlighting disturbing parallels between capitalism and fundamentalism. In Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), a disaffected corporate scientist develops a pandemic that seeds a religious revival and causes blame to fall on a misrepresented sect of religious environmentalists. In Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), a flu that decimates the global population is interpreted as a purifying act of God. In Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), following a deadly disease that originates in China, a former corporate product coordinator based in New York City who mass-markets Bibles falls into the clutches of a religious cult led by an ex-IT specialist and investor. Our analysis examines how religion has been subsumed within corporate capitalism as well as the broad appeal unscientific reactions to the coronavirus could ultimately have, particularly as there are more virus-related economic problems.
Journal Article
The absence of sparrows
Eleven-year-old bird watcher Ben must defy his brother to save their father after the glass plague sweeps through their town and a voice on the radio demands the simultaneous shattering of all plague victims.
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The Smallpox Report
After the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccination has become synonymous with an opaque biopower that legislates compulsory immunization at a distance. Contemporary illness narratives have become outlets for distrust, misinformation, reckless denialism, and selfish noncompliance. In The Smallpox Report , Fuson Wang rewinds this contemporary impasse between physician and patient back to the Romantic-era origins of vaccination.
The book offers a literary-historical account of smallpox vaccination, contending that the disease’s eventual eradication in 1980 was as much a triumph of the literary imagination as it was an achievement of medical Enlightenment science. Wang traces our modern pandemic-era crisis of vaccine hesitancy back to Edward Jenner’s publication of his treatise on vaccination in 1798, the first rumblings of an anti-vaccination movement, and vaccination’s formative literary history that included authors such as William Wordsworth, William Blake, John Keats, Mary Shelley, and Arthur Conan Doyle. The book concludes with a re-examination of the current deeply contentious public discourse about vaccines that has arisen in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. By recovering the surprisingly literary genres of Romantic-era medical writing, The Smallpox Report models a new literary historical perspective on our own crises of vaccine refusal.
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