Now that we have time to read: four literary approaches to pandemics

Apart from Psalm 91 and Revelation chapter 6 there is some relevant literature that might help keep readers occupied in current weeks:

• Samuel Pepys’ diary entries on the Great Plague of 1665: ‘One at the table told an odd passage in this late plague: that at Petersfield, I think, he said, one side of the street had every house almost infected through the town, and the other, not one shut up.’
• Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (full text here; describes 1665 but written about 1722, based  on a contemporary source: ‘[I]t was rumoured that an order of the Government was to be issued out to place turnpikes and barriers on the road to prevent people travelling …’;
• Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947), which has been seen as both literal and allegorical;
• Gabriel García Márquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), which is more about the former than the latter.

Any more? Let us know.

More on the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918-19.

23 March 2020