Writing Plague : Language and Violence from the Black Death to COVID-19 / / by Alfred Thomas

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910564691903321
• Autore: Thomas Alfred <1958->
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Cham : , : Springer International Publishing : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2022
• ISBN: 9783030948504; 9783030948498
• Edizione: [1st ed. 2022.]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (279 pages)
• Collana: The New Middle Ages, , 2945-5944
• Disciplina: 809.933561
• Soggetti: Literature, Medieval; Literature - History and criticism; Literature, Modern - 20th century; Judaism and culture; Philosophy, Medieval; Europe - History - 476-1492; Medieval Literature; Literary Criticism; Twentieth-Century Literature; Jewish Cultural Studies; Medieval Philosophy; History of Medieval Europe
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: 1. Introduction: Language and Violence from the Black Death to COVID-19 -- 2. The Pardoner, the Prioress, and the Pandemic: Jews and Other Scapegoats in Fourteenth-Century European Culture -- 3. Death and the Maiden: Mourning and Melancholy in Pearl and the Late Medieval European Elegy -- 4. The Plague’s The Thing: Pandemic and Religious Politics in Shakespeare’s Drama -- 5. The Brown Plague and the White Sickness: Fascism and the Crisis of Democracy in Twentieth-Century Plague Fiction and Film -- 6. Conclusion.
• Sommario/riassunto: Writing Plague: Language and Violence from the Black Death to COVID-; 19 brings a holistic and comparative perspective to “plague writing” from the later Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. It argues that while the human “hardware” has changed enormously between the medieval past and the present the human “software” has remained remarkably similar across time. Through close readings of works by medieval writers like Guillaume de Machaut, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century, select plays by Shakespeare, and modern “plague” fiction and film, Alfred Thomas convincingly demonstrates psychological continuities between the Black Death and COVID-19. Thomas highlights the danger of scapegoating vulnerable minority groups such as Asian Americans and Jews in today’s America. This wide-ranging study will thus be of interest not only to medievalists but also to students of modernity as well as the general reader.