Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Writing Plague: Language and Violence from the Black Death to Covid-19

Writing Plague: Language and Violence from the Black Death to Covid-19

Thomas, Alfred

Hardcover

Series: New Middle Ages

Literary CriticismJudaism

ISBN10: 3030948498
ISBN13: 9783030948498
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: Apr 23 2022
Pages: 265
Weight: 1.10
Height: 0.69 Width: 5.83 Depth: 8.27
Language: English
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 (urbanization, technology, mass warfare, and advances in medical science), the human software (emotional and psychological reactions to the shock of pandemic) 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. In showing how in times of plague human beings repress their fears and fantasies and displace them onto the threatening other, 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.

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