scholarly journals History of Pandemics in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century

СИНЕЗА ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adewunmi J. Falode ◽  
Moses J. Yakubu ◽  
Olusegun J. Bolarinwa

This work is the historical analysis of pandemics in the Twentieth and Twenty-first century. It shows that the influenza virus has been responsible for major pandemic outbreaks in the two centuries. The work shows that bacteria and viruses, especially Yersinia pestis and the influenza virus, have been responsible for the outbreaks of major pandemics in recorded history. It carries-out a compre- hensive and extensive analysis of the various impacts of historical and contemporary pandemics like the Plague of Justinian, Bu- bonic plague, Spanish flu, Cholera pandemics and also the novel COVID-19 had on the trajectory of world history. The work shows that such pandemics profoundly affects political, economic, social, religious, technological, health and educational developments in states in the post-pandemic periods. Additionally, this work com- prehensively identified the commonalities among the pandem- ic-causing diseases in the Twentieth and Twenty-first century. It shows, among other things, that pandemic-causing diseases usu- ally strikes in waves and that globalization plays an active role in the transmission of infection in the two centuries. The work concludes by showing that pandemics usually strikes in three waves and based on this assertion the world should be prepared to respond to the second and third waves of the COVID-19.

This book offers an account on the last eight decades of British and Irish prose fiction. It begins during the Second World War, when novel production fell by more than a third, and ends at a time when new technologies have made possible the publication of an unprecedented number of fiction titles and have changed completely the relationship between authors, publishers, the novel, and the reader. The chapters look at the impact of global warfare on the novel from the Second World War to the Cold War to the twenty-first century; the reflexive continuities of late modernism; the influence of film and television on the novel form; mobile and fluid connections between sexuality, gender, and different periods of women’s writing; a broad range of migrant and ethnic fictions; and the continuities and discontinuities of prose fiction in different regional, national, class, and global contexts. Across the volume there is a blurring of the boundary between genre fiction and literary fiction, as the literary thinking of the period is traced in the spy novel, the children’s novel, the historical novel, the serial novel, shorter fiction, the science fiction novel, and the comic novel. The final chapters of the volume explore the relationship of twenty-first century fiction to post-war culture, and show how this new fiction both emerges from the history of the novel, and prefigures the novel to come.


Author(s):  
Peter Boxall ◽  
Bryan Cheyette

This chapter addresses the future of the novel. It also reflects on the possibility and nature of historical change. The push and pull between the novel as an expressive symptom of an ailing culture, and the novel as the engine for the production of new cultural possibilities, runs through the long history of novelists’ reflections on the future of the novel. From our perspective in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the perception of a watershed triggered by 1973, and a new understanding of the relationship between style, fiction, and knowledge, seems remarkably prescient. Moreover, the new generation of novelists that have emerged since the turn of the century have collectively registered the re-emergence of a kind of historical vitality in the culture.


Author(s):  
Amanda Golden

This essay chronicles how copyright has affected the publication of James Joyce's work, the scholarly and aesthetic use of Joyce's words, and how the legal regime has been used in criticism. It offers prognosticatory thoughts on the outcomes of recent technological developments and copyright changes: "new scholarship can quote more liberally and editions can present the novel in a fashion that speaks to the changing scope of Joyce scholarship in the twenty-first century." While research continues in the history of Joyce and copyright, this essay gives an overview of how this legal regime has inflected Joyce studies thus far.


Author(s):  
Claire Monk

During their ongoing lives, both Forster’s Maurice and Merchant Ivory Productions’ 1987 film adaptation have suffered parallel forms of critical dismissal and misrecognition which deny their cultural, political or affective significance. In the twenty-first century, however, such responses are challenged by the enduring and profound impact of both novel and film on readers/audiences, vividly evident in post-2000 Web 2.0 participatory culture. This chapter connects Maurice’s evolution across three phases of its (trans)textual history. First, the palimpsestic history of Maurice ‘the’ novel, shaped by multiple ‘peer reviewers’, divergent manuscripts and protracted textual revisions. Second, the 1987 film adaptation, which was the product of a comparably complicated, contestatory genesis and significant structural reworking. Third, Maurice’s still-unfolding public life as manifested in its twenty-first-century popular reception and further (re-)adaptations, sequels and paratexts, including fanworks. Since 2004, more than 170 Maurice fanfictions have been published online in English alone. These are of interest for the work done by fans in extending Forster’s sexual politics, utopian vision and the Maurice/Alec pairing into ‘the for ever and ever that fiction allows’ and for their solutions to perceived difficulties or limitations within the novel and/or film, conversely prompting reflection on the ‘fannishness’ of Maurice itself.


Author(s):  
Jan Moje

This chapter gives an overview of the history of recording and publishing epigraphic sources in Demotic language and script from the Late Period to Greco-Roman Egypt (seventh century bce to third century ce), for example, on stelae, offering tables, coffins, or votive gifts. The history of editing such texts and objects spans over two hundred years. Here, the important steps and pioneering publications on Demotic epigraphy are examined. They start from the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt found the Rosetta stone, until the twenty-first century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 254-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luke Heemsbergen ◽  
Angela Daly ◽  
Jiajie Lu ◽  
Thomas Birtchnell

This article outlines preliminary findings from a futures forecasting exercise where participants in Shenzhen and Singapore considered the socio-technological construction of 3D printing in terms of work and social change. We offered participants ideal political-economic futures across local–global knowledge and capital–commons dimensions, and then had them backcast the contextual waypoints across markets, culture, policy, law and technology dimensions that help guide towards each future. Their discussion identified various contextually sensitive points, but also tended to dismiss the farthest reaches of each proposed ideal, often reverting to familiar contextual signifiers. Here, we offer discussion on how participants saw culture and industry shaping futures for pertinent political economic concerns in the twenty-first century.


1999 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 712
Author(s):  
Clark G. Reynolds ◽  
James L. George

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 187-207
Author(s):  
Peter Arnds

This article focuses on the concept of randomness as the absence of goal-oriented movement in literary walks. The literature of walking displays the happenstance of adventure as one of the great antidotes to our inane, highly technologized, digitalized twenty-first-century lifestyle. In the end, however, such randomness may reveal itself as not so random after all, as the purpose of the journey, its inherent telos, discloses itself while travelling or in hindsight. This article provides brief glimpses into the history of literary walks to examine this tension between apparent randomness and the non-random. By drawing on a range of cultural theories and theorizations of travel and especially of walking, I look at literary foot travel in the nineteenth century, the Romantics and American Transcendentalists, some great adventure hikes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the urban and rural flâneur. In doing so the article does not lose sight of the question of how we can instrumentalize the literature of walking for life during the current pandemic.


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