Includes bibliographical references and index.

List of Figures -- Notes on Contributors -- Introduction: What is Pandemic Storytelling? -- Jan Alber, Deborah de Muijnck, and Jessica Jumpertz -- PART 1: Pandemic Storytelling: Issues of Form and Structure -- 1 A Pandemic Chronicle: Harnessing Narrative Fusion -- Rita Charon -- 2 Fiction, the Pandemic, and the Rhetorical Approach to Fictionality: Roddy Doyle’s Life without Children -- James Phelan -- PART 2: The Central Role of Experientiality in Crisis Narratives -- 3 Illness Trauma, Life-Writing, and Pandemic Storytelling -- Hanna Meretoja -- 4 Crisis and Creativity: Poetry in Times of Corona -- Jarmila Mildorf -- PART 3: The Uncertainty and Unreliability of Stories about Corona -- 5 Certainty and Uncertainty in Pandemic Storytelling: Tales from the US, the UK, and Beyond -- Molly Andrews and Mark Freeman -- 6 COVID-19 Knowledge, Transmedia Narratives, and the Poetics of Unreliability in Postdigital Environments -- Monika Pietrzak-Franger -- PART 4: Time, Temporalities, and the Process of Waiting -- 7 No Sense of an Ending: Narrating Pandemic Temporalities -- Christoph Singer -- 8 Imaginary Places: Metamorphoses of the Familiar in Times of Crisis -- Marina Grishakova -- PART 5: Narratives as Projections of Possible Futures -- 9 Corona Narratives from the Anglophone World – Speculations about the Post-Pandemic Future -- Birgit Neumann -- 10 Pandemic Stories as Crisis Narratives: Competing Narratives of the Corona Virus Pandemic as an Epistemological Crisis and a Crisis of Forms of Life -- Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning -- Index.

This volume offers unique, interdisciplinary perspectives by evaluating, analyzing, and interpreting how the past, the present, and potential futures may be affected by pandemic storytelling. It explores the interplay between various disciplines that explore COVID-19 narratives or study the influence of pandemics on storytelling. The authors invite you to delve into the intricate social, cultural, and political dynamics between anthropocentric societies, human nature, and their implications for an understanding of our interactions with others and environments. Most importantly, this volume initiates insightful conversations, highlighting that in times of crisis the most valuable thing we can hold on to is human connection.

English

Description based on print version record.