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. 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