Scott Slovic

The COVID-19 pandemic, especially during the early months of 2020, brought about not only fear and loss, but an unexpected increase in daily vigilance with regard to personal safety and public health among citizens throughout the world. This chapter takes a literary approach to the question of how our minds respond not only to actual pandemics but to textual representations of public health crises, which are examples of planetary and human precarity. Although the feeling of precarity might at first glance appear to be a negative condition, something to be avoided if possible, Kate Rigby suggests in her book Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times, that pandemic novels facilitate the capacity for "mindfulness" and "critical self-reflection". This chapter probes the connection between the complex narrative structures of pandemic fiction and an elevated sense of self-reflective vigilance.

The discipline of ecocriticism (or ecological literary studies) can be traced back to the earliest commentaries on natural themes in human texts, such as conversations about paintings of animals on the walls of European caves or discussions about how ancient songs invoked rain to bring crops to life. In A Century of Early Ecocriticism, David Mazel (2001) argues that some of the earliest examples of academic ecocritical studies of literature began in the 1860s with commentaries on works focused on environmental topics, such as the writings of John and William Bartram and Henry David Thoreau. He follows a trajectory of