Pandemic protagonists: viral (re)actions in pandemic and Corona fictions

During the first mandatory lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic, citizens worldwide turned to »pandemic fictions« or started to produce their own »Corona Fictions« across different media. These accounts of (previously) experienced or imagined health crises feature a great variety of protagonists and their (re)actions in response to the exceptional circumstances. The contributors to this volume take a closer look at different pandemic protagonists in fictional narratives relating to the Covid-19 pandemic as well as in existing pandemic fictions. Thereby they provide new insights into pandemic narratives from a cultural, literary, and media studies perspective from antiquity to today.

Frontmatter --; Table of Contents --; Acknowledgements --; Pandemic Protagonists (Re)Claiming Agency: An Introduction --; Bloody Investigations. Scientists as Ambiguous Pandemic Protagonists in the Dystopian Streaming Series La Valla and La Révolution --; Corona Palimpsests: Pandemic Protagonists as Readers --; Hysterical Men and Reasoning Women? On Gender Roles and Agency in Corona Fictions --; La novela de la pandemia como una modalidad de la novela de la crisis. El caso de La madre del futbolista de Pablo García Casado --; Mediated Vulnerabilities: Transforming Virginia Woolf’s Characters in Corona Fictions --; ‘¿Te importa?’ Entre soledad y olvido: la representación de los ancianos en el teatro español durante la pandemia de COVID-19 --; Immunity and Community: The Role of Immune Protagonists in Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (1995) and Roth’s Nemesis (2010) --; The Crowd as a Pandemic Character: Determinism, Entertainment and Transgression in Literature --; ‘C’était quelqu’un de toute façon’ : les personnages humains et non humains dans le roman animaliste Les Métamorphoses de Camille Brunel --; The Role of Animals in Pandemic Narratives: Forewarning Disaster, Causing Outbreaks, Conferring Immunity --; Germs as Social Protagonists: (In)visible Enemies and the Fear of Epidemic Invasion in Classical Hollywood Cinema --; Human-Viral Hybrids as Challenge to the Outbreak Narrative and Neo-Liberal Biopolitics --; Protagonisti in cerca di una nuova agency: la pandemia di Covid-19 nella letteratura italiana --; Corona Fictions Agents: Cinematic Representations of Hopeful Pandemic Protagonists in Early Corona Fictions --; Authors