Pandemic Obsession

How They Feature in our Popular Culture

Stephen Basdeo

• Publisher: Pen and Sword History
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9781399092227
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

" Pestilence entered… The ordinary pursuits of society were paralysed; all previously-formed plans of happiness, business, trade, occupation, and domestic arrangement, were checked as cruelly and abruptly as if every principle of the human mind were in a moment subverted… The physicians saw that human aid was vain, and that destruction inevitably awaited all who approached the infected. Terrific mortality! Appalling scourge of the human race!" — George W.M. Reynolds Throughout history humankind has faced a number of deadly pandemics and such diseases have left their mark in history books, fine art, novels, life writing, and newspapers. This book collects together writings from across the centuries which illuminate people's experiences with plagues and pandemics. From Ancient Greece there is Thucydides on the Athenian Plague; Procopius gives his account of Plague of Justinian; also included is many more extracts of writings on plagues from medieval and early modern writers. Readers can enjoy several works of fiction including an abridged version of Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), a reproduction in full of Jack London's Scarlet Plague (1912), as well as short pandemic stories from Edgar Allan Poe, George W.M. Reynolds, Daniel Defoe, and William Harrison Ainsworth.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Bubonic Plague
• The Plague of AD 664: The First Pandemic in English History
• The Black Death
• The Plague in Elizabethan and Jacobean Times
• Tales of the Plague and the Fire (1665–66)
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Plagues
• Mephistopheles, the Bringer of Pestilence
• The End of the Human Race
• A Post-Apocalyptic Pandemic
• Notes