Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature

Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature examines Latin plague discourse of the late Roman Republic and early Empire. Writers of this period developed important conventions of the western plague narrative as a response to the destabilization of the body politic, using largely fictive representations of epidemic disease to address the collapse of the social order and suggest remedies for its recovery. Such innovations in plague discourse have subsequently impacted representations as diverse as Carlo Coppola’s paintings of bubonic plague in seventeenth-century Naples and Margaret Atwood’s twenty-first-century Maddaddam Trilogy.