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Infection and Insignificance: Pandemic Narratives in the Age of the Anthropocene
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Infection and Insignificance: Pandemic Narratives in the Age of the Anthropocene
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Journal Article
Infection and Insignificance: Pandemic Narratives in the Age of the Anthropocene
2025
Overview
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.
