Literatures of contagion: the Camusian legacy

Abstract

Literature thinks about and explores plagues, whether of natural origin such as epidemics, or of social and political origin such as wars. These plagues are the manifestation of adversity and chaos in the world. Our study takes a hermeneutical look at how literature deals with the reality of epidemics, and how it offers food for thought on how man and society react to the test of adversity. To do this, we mainly examined Albert Camus’s The Plague, a work hypotext for other fictions from which we chose Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and José Saramago’s Blindness. This necessitated a comparative approach to epidemic representations in the works of the three authors, ranging from realism to magic realism.