Plague Year Research Articles

ERDEMLİ BİR PANDEMİ Mİ? DANIEL DEFOE’NUN VEBA YILI GÜNLÜĞÜ’NDE KARA ÖLÜME KARŞI AHLÂKİ (OLMAYAN) TEPKİLER

Throughout the history, humanity has suffered many pandemics which people have responded to in various ways, struggled to cope with, and ultimately survived. As the history has made humanity witness, there is not even one pandemic until now which humanity has not come through. However, to survive a pandemic requires multiple capabilities, not only physical, social, and financial, but most importantly a moral capability. In this sense, the narratives of pandemic are stimulating to discern how moral and immoral attitudes are adopted while going through hard times. In the light of it, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year published in 1722 sheds light on the Great Plague of London in 1665 by using a rationalist point of view which places the novel among realist historical narratives. However, Defoe’s documentation of the 1665 plague is also a narrative of morality that depicts and gives insight into how people behave in the times of a pandemic and respond them morally or immorally. Considering Defoe’s range of people–the wealthiest people running away from the city at once, the governors who quarantine houses leaving people to death, the ignorant infectious people spreading the plague, the fraud ecclesiastics, physicians, and magicians who exploit people; and the ones who prefer to survive by taking care of each other–A Journal signs how the people who are suffering and the others who take advantage of their suffering give moral or immoral responses to a fatal pandemic. To provide an insight into the current (im)moral responses to today’s Covid-19 pandemic, this study is an effort to make the place of moral philosophy visible in the narrative of Defoe which could be accepted as a call from over the centuries.

Hybridity and Agency in Interactive Comic Books

This paper focuses on interactive and animated comic books as visual storytelling medium. With the rise of digital media, previous forms and methods of storytelling has been changed and reformed in hybridity and/or as emerging medium. Like movies, documentaries, games; comic books gained digital, moving, and interactive levels to be described and examined. This research aims to analyze interactivity maps to reach forms of interactivity used in selected comic books as examples representing emerged types of this media under various names such as motion comics, interactive comics, hyper comics, interactive game comics and web comics. As Goodbrey (2007) states different types of comics in the scope of hybridization and digitality of the medium, a distinction between levels of interactivity in video games is offered in digital game theory. Digital types of comic books are not all interactive in the sense of content and may be more linear than a printed “choose your own adventure” comic book like Eight Grade Witch (Gaska et. al, 2021). With digitality of the medium, interactivity is set firstly in form providing an agency for the interactor by turning the pages or making the reader click on pages. Some examples, such as web comics expands the medium to develop an interactivity between text and audience; some of them became more interactive providing more agency on the page; some are interactive in content and others converge comics books with games and redefine the medium with play at the center. Main question guiding the research is how they provide different forms of interactive of storytelling. Meanwhile: An Interactive Comic Book (Zarfhome Software, 2018), Framed (Noodlecake Studios, 2014), Florence (Mountains Studio, 2018) and Our Plague Year (Burton, 2022) are selected examples representing different forms of digital comic books and interactive – sequential storytelling to be analyzed comparatively within the scope of this research. In conclusion interactivity forms and maps are exposed and discussed through Sheldon’s interactivity categories. The epistemology of interactivity is reconsidered with an analysis of interactive and animated comic books which combine various media and provide distinct ways of hybridity.

Contagion and Confinement

Abstract This article takes two epidemics, one historical and the other allegorical, for comparison against the current Covid-19 crisis. Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year consists of a narrator whose objectivity and existence are ambiguous. José Saramago’s Blindness, published in the original Portuguese as an “essay,” traces the journey of a cluster of citizens through a polis afflicted by a sudden, infectious outbreak. The respective experiences of confinement: at home, in a disused mental hospital, and within the wider spaces of the city, are analysed in this article with reference to Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, alongside seminal works by Giorgio Agamben, Michel de Certeau and Susan Sontag. The article also aims to indicate how the current Covid-19 crisis may provide a scene of reading, alongside a contemporary response from Slavoj Žižek.

Birdsong in a Time of Silence by Steven Lovatt

Reviewed by: Birdsong in a Time of Silence by Steven Lovatt Chris Arthur Steven Lovatt Birdsong in a Time of Silence London. Particular Books. 2021. 149 pages. IN TRYING TO convey the quality of Birdsong in a Time of Silence, I found myself remembering something from another beautifully written bird-themed book. In Owls and Other Fantasies, Mary Oliver says: "To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work." Steven Lovatt's elegiac meditation is underlain by—stems from—paying attention to something frequently unnoticed. The "time of silence" that rekindled his interest in listening to birds refers to the first of the UK's Covid-19 lockdowns. Coincidentally, the pandemic struck "at just that moment in the natural calendar when birdsong resumes in full force." Lovatt was by no means alone in being struck by birdsong during lockdown. As he notes, thousands of people, with more time to take in what was happening around them and with less traffic noise, started to notice and appreciate it. Listening to birdsong is one thing; writing a book about it something else. What gives Birdsong in a Time of Silence its charm is the deft and delicate touch Lovatt brings to describing something that's highly resistant to being put into words. He talks about the way, at dusk, "robins tick, pause and tick again, as though searching for the combination that will finally open the vault of the night." With the cacophony of a rookery he suggests that were it possible to reduce the sound to one "emotional alloy," it would be contentment. In explaining the difference between the sounds made by crows, rooks, and jackdaws, he likens their raucous noises to "pencils of different hardness." They share a "kindred graphite," but express it in ways as varied as an 8B and HB pencil. He describes the whistles of two male blackbirds confronting each other as "a lode of malice made briefly audible." In part a celebration of the beauty and mystery of birdsong, in part a reflection on how we live and how that might be bettered, in part pages from a journal of a plague year, Lovatt has written an engaging and powerful volume. Its modest length belies its impact. This is the author's first book. One hopes it is a harbinger of others. The skill with which he lays before readers "an almost forgotten aspect of the grammar of reality" suggests that his is a voice worth listening out for. Whether he's talking about migration, the way unhatched chicks are "taught" in the egg by their parents' singing, or the crucial importance of the listening female birds when it comes to understanding birdsong, the book is informed by a wealth of ornithological knowledge. Far from reducing its pages to a dull monograph, such knowledge enhances the points he makes. Though alert to the enormous threats faced by birds—"In Britain alone," we're told, "there are fifty million fewer birds" than when Rachel Carson's Silent Spring appeared in 1962—Birdsong in a Time of Silence is not an environmental jeremiad. Instead, it displays quiet optimism. Looking at how birdsong enriched people's lives during lockdown, how paying attention to the natural world can lead to new concern for it, Lovatt reckons that maybe "something good" can emerge from this time of "uncertainty and suffering." Without a hint of the heavy-handedness that often happens when writers turn reflexive and examine their own craft, Lovatt's thoughts on the difficulties his topic presents and how he tackled them add to the appeal of the book. Aware of his reliance on simile and metaphor, he notes how many of the comparisons he uses are, like the birds they describe, under threat. He likens a wren's song to the spinning of a spindle, a bullfinch's call to the creaking of an iron gate, the din of reed warblers to a smithy, whilst a noisy skein of geese reminds him of "coupled train carriages going over points." The problem is that all these objects "are rapidly fading from the world." He worries that our age of "enforced digitization" impoverishes "the common soundscape" and so restricts "our...

Reading Projects

Reading Projects William Roebuck (bio) Some people collect stamps. Others throw axes or play quidditch. From the Middle English term hobyn, denoting a toy horse and hence an activity done for fun, "hobby" today seems like a pretty inclusive term, although a quick search on Wikipedia, turning up nearly four hundred hobbies, did not include my personal go-to recreational activity, reading projects, perhaps because it sounds about as cutting-edge as a minuet dance club. And unlike a rash of coolly obscure names for practitioners of their hobby, whether old reliables "philatelist" and "lepidopterist"—not to invidiously single out stamp and butterfly collectors—or lesser-known practitioners such as badge-collecting "scutelliphilists," "reading projectologist" just doesn't have a lot of fizz and pop to it. But there it is; to paraphrase a familiar public confessional formula: "My name is Bill, and I'm a reader." When I was a young person growing up in North Carolina, I would try to pass off my love of reading as a hobby. "Why, son, that ain't a hobby," I remember being told. Over the years, despite that cool reaction from various gatekeepers intent on not letting reading stink up the pristine standards of hobbydom, I found myself forging ahead and organizing my reading activity into the somewhat more cataloged, rounded activity I call "reading projects." Sometimes this has meant tackling an author's entire body of work, at least as I defined it, or the major novels or one topical hit, such as Daniel Defoe's powerful A Journal of the Plague Year, read in our year of coronavirus, three hundred years after it was first published. Occasionally it has denoted efforts to educate myself on a particular topic, whether the history of Saudi Arabia or the migration of the blues out of the Mississippi Delta. From time to time, I've gone for a "this and that" pattern, reading a novel recently published in alternation with something more classic and extending the pattern. At one point, for example, in a possibly misbegotten effort to read the major novels of Henry James, works of [End Page 184] increasing density and difficulty from his late-career, pre–World War I years, I spiced things up by reading a novel each by Colson Whitehead, Paul Beatty, and Jennifer Egan—razor-sharp contemporary novelists—in between my Ironman efforts with The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove, and The Ambassadors. In addition to the change of pace, there were some interesting literary ricochets between works: for example, Whitehead's The Underground Railroad and the background that shaped James's early years under the watchful abolitionist eye of his father and James senior's company of famous family friends and John Brown supporters Emerson and Thoreau. Beatty's merciless, satiric wit, on display in The Sellout, with equal measures of Jonathan Swift and Dave Chappelle, provided fierce respite from James's spirited but doomed American heiresses in Europe. And while nothing contemporary quite prepared me for the high-toned rigors (and occasional longueurs) of James's The Ambassadors, I do believe that Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, with its beautifully interlocking stories, served as a nice chaser—or, more precisely, morning-after hair-of-the-dog concoction—to ward off the reading hangover James had given me. Egan's novel, ranging over forty-plus years in the rock music industry, also managed, with its dizzying multiple perspectives, to half capture, half anticipate the e-podified emotional zeitgeist we inhabit. This brings me to that delicate but unavoidable issue that any reading projectologist faces when they start showing off their collection. Other hobbyists have collected different stamps or polished rocks or postcards—or books read. Does anyone care what this rail fan or that reader has to say about his or her favorite model trains or novels? The answer, surprisingly enough, is that people do, in limited but important ways. I believe readers, with regard to other readers, are willing to suspend resistance or perhaps apathy towards others' reading choices in order to facilitate the ongoing conversations constantly in play among book lovers: "What do I like?" "Why did you...

Journals of the Plague Year: The Ottoman Press and the Istanbul Cholera Outbreak of 1871

ABSTRACT: The outbreak of cholera in Istanbul in the autumn of 1871 has long been considered something of a historical non-event. Although responsible for several thousand deaths, in the historiography of the city it remains almost entirely obscured. Yet the 1871 outbreak briefly highlighted the social tensions in the burgeoning Istanbulite public sphere, and threatened to fracture the formerly "unified" Istanbulite medical establishment along spatial, colonial, and racialized lines. This article examines the reportage of four newspapers which circulated in Istanbul during the outbreak, each of which claimed to speak for a generalized public, albeit through very different methods. Three of these newspapers—the English-language The Levant Herald , the French-language La Turquie , and the Ottoman Turkish Basiret —were dailies with circulations in the thousands. The fourth paper, the French-language Gazette Médicale d'Orient , was instead the press organ of the city's emergent sanitary establishment. The responses of these papers to this sudden crisis revealed the underlying assumptions which animated Istanbulite social and medical discourse in the late Ottoman Empire, and the tensions inherent in claims to speak for public opinion or to act on behalf of global public health.

Plague Years: A Doctor's Journey through the AIDS Crisis

Plague Years: A Doctor's Journey through the AIDS Crisis

There Is No Loneliness Like Theirs

There Is No Loneliness Like Theirs

A Journal of the Plague Year by Terayama Shūji in Collaboration with Kishida Rio: “Contagious Magic” for a Time of Epidemic

Terayama Shūji (1935–1983), a leading figure in the Japanese avant-garde theatre movement, founded his theatre troupe Tenjō Sajiki (The Peanut Gallery) in 1967. Terayama and company member/collaborating writer Kishida Rio (1946–2003) scripted Ekibyō ryūkōki (A Journal of the Plague Year) in 1975 as the last of three plays created for a European audience. Inspired by Daniel Defoe’s fictional memoir of the same title, the play deals with isolation, denial, rage, and the many coping strategies of a community confronting a deadly epidemic. The play shows how words are a powerful contagion, and by infecting the imagination and memory, they are as much a plague as any disease. Although written and produced in 1975, with ideas from a 1772 fictional memoir about a 1665 plague in London, Terayama and Kishida’s A Journal of the Plague Year is a play for our times. It is hauntingly prescient, offering a shocking and often comical reflection of our own lives during the current COVID-19 pandemic.

The Great London Plague of 1665 and the US COVID-19 Pandemic Experience Compared

Using Daniel Dafoe's Journal of the Plague Year, Frank O'Hara examines the experience of the plague, the reactions of people, and changes to social cohesion and compares the current COVID-19 pandemic. These isses get at basic human reactions to crisis, and the similarities and differences between the 17th and 21st centuries are instructive.

Writing on Death: Plague Narratives. A Review Essay

AbstractThis essay discusses several books, ancient and recent, on plagues to ask the question: Can we face death without turning away from it through historical narration? Can we write about death, which only afflicts individuals, without stripping death of its individuality? After briefly addressing these questions, I discuss five books, one from the ancient period (Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War), one from the late medieval period (Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron), one from the early modern period (Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year), and two from the modern period (Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, and Frank Snowden’s Epidemics and Society). These books not only come from different eras but also reflect different written responses to death—ancient history, story/fable, reportage, futuristic novel, and contemporary history. The essay concludes by considering a counterargument to its focus on death, an argument developed by Baruch Spinoza which claims that humans should think nothing less than of death.

Henry Foe's dilemma

AbstractIn 1722, Daniel Defoe publishedA Journal of the Plague Year– a supposed account of the ‘great plague’ of 1665. It is commonly thought to be one of his most incisive pieces of ‘realist’ fiction. And, in our moment, one of his most prescient. The purpose of this paper is to revisit Defoe'sJournalin order to stimulate reflection on our present experience of living through the ‘plague year’ of 2020. There is much, as we shall see, about governance during a plague that is resonant – but much also about ‘hearts melted into tears’, about suffering, how it is felt and how it is perceived. The purpose of theJournal, according to Defoe at least, was to inform ‘those who come after’, so that they might be better prepared, so that they would not make the same mistakes. We will see.

Siena, Kevin. Rotten Bodies: Class & Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

Siena, Kevin. <i>Rotten Bodies: Class &amp; Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Britain</i>.

Annika Mann. Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print.

Annika Mann. <i>Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print</i>.

Recent Articles

Recent Articles

Journal of a Plague Year: 6 Voices from the Humanities Worldwide. Part II

Journal of a Plague Year: 6 Voices from the Humanities Worldwide. Part II

Duality in novels and films about pandemics

Both literature and films have been dealing with a disease outbreak for a long time. This paper will deal with the metaphorical aspect of viruses especially in the view of today’s pandemics. First, a brief overview of such novels and films will be given starting with Daniel Defoe and his A Journal of the Plague Year and films such as Twelve Monkeys, Contagion, Outbreak. The emphasis will not be on the virus itself but on its metaphorical meaning and the duality in novels and films – e.g. between good and evil, order and chaos. The paper will mostly focus on the novels The Stand by Stephen King, and the film Twelve Monkeys. The main idea which connects them all would be a virus as a metaphor, the end of humanity, and everlasting fight between good and evil.

Ali Smith's and Olivia Laing's Fictions of Immediacy

Ali Smith's and Olivia Laing's Fictions of Immediacy

Sözü “yaymak:” Salgın anlatılarının uyarlamalarında bir metod olarak bulaşım

Plagues have both infected physical bodies as bacterial and viral epidemics and permeated textual bodies starting from ancient and biblical texts throughout history. This paper will explore the plague as portrayed in Daniel Defoe’s fictional testimony A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and Mark Ravenhill’s libretto of his music theatre Ten Plagues (2011). Defoe brings together poignant fictional stories about the plague victims and survivors with the statistical reports quoted, and at times analysed, by his narrator to portray the Great Plague of London that hit the city in 1665. Ten Plagues is a stage adaptation of A Journal of the Plague Year. Drawing upon the textual dynamics of the plague or “the outbreak narrative” in Priscilla Wald’s terms (2008) and Linda Hutcheon’s understanding of adaptation as a palimpsest (2006), this paper argues that the idea of contagion could operate not only as subject matter or a narrative thread but also as a method or medium as demonstrated by these two works. The interwoven stories of A Journal and Ten Plagues represent survival and resilience along with the fragile and precarious condition of humanity under medical and social uncertainties. The paper concludes that Defoe and Ravenhill lead their audience to contemplate on “diseased” pasts and futures by envisioning isolation and connection in dire times and establish the power of art and fiction in the aesthetic and critical space they create together.

Epidemic as Metaphor: the Allegorical Significance of Epidemic Accounts in Literature

"Epidemic as Metaphor: The Allegorical Significance of Epidemic Accounts in Literature. Our paper searches for those common elements in selected literary representations of the plagues that have affected humanity. As a theoretical framework for our research, we have considered the contributions of Peta Michell, who equals pandemic with contagion and sees it as a metaphor; Susan Sontag views illness as a punishment or a sign, the subject of a metaphorization. Christa Jansohn sees the pest as a metaphor for an extreme form of collective calamity. For René Girard, the medical plague is a metaphor for the social plague, and Gilles Deleuze thinks that fabulation is a “health enterprise.” From the vast library of the pandemic, we have selected examples from Antiquity to the 19th century: Thucydides, Lucretius, Boccaccio, Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jack London. For Camus, the plague is an allegory of evil, oppression and war. Our paper explores the lessons learned from these texts, irrespective of their degree of factuality or fictionality, pointing out how the plague is used metaphorically and allegorically to reveal a more profound truth about different societies and humanity. Keywords: epidemic, plague, The Decameron (Boccaccio), A Journal of the Plague Year (Daniel Defoe), King Pest (Edgar Allan Poe), The Last Man (Mary Shelley), The Nature of Things (Lucretius), The Plague (Albert Camus), The Scarlet Plague (Jack London), The War of the Peloponnesians (Thucydides) "