“Set in 1655 and published in 1722, the novel was likely based, in part, on the journals of the author’s uncle,” writes the Globe and Mail‘s Alec Scott. “There, isolated for two weeks, they pass the time by telling each other stories” - and “lively, bizarre, and often very filthy stories” at that - “with a different theme for each day.”Ī later outbreak of the bubonic plague in London inspired Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe to write the A Journal of the Plague Year. “His protagonists, seven women and three men, retreat to a villa outside Florence to avoid the pandemic,” writes The Guardian‘s Lois Beckett, referring to the bubonic plague, or “Black Death,” that ravaged Europe in the mid-14th century.
In the European canon, no such work is more venerable than The Decameron, written by Renaissance humanist Giovanni Boccaccio in the late 1340s and early 1350s. As the coronavirus has spread through the English-speaking world over the past month, pandemic-themed reading lists have appeared in all manner of outlets: Time, PBS, the Hollywood Reporter, the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, Haaretz, Vulture, Electric Literature, and others besides.Īs mankind’s oldest deadly foe, disease has provided themes to literature since literature’s very invention.
Describing conditions characteristic of life in the early 21st century, future historians may well point to such epidemic viral illnesses as SARS, MERS, and the now-rampaging COVID-19. But those focused on culture will also have their pick of much more benign recurring phenomena to explain: topical book lists, for instance, which crop up in the 21st-century press at the faintest prompting by current events.
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