In Contagion's Wake: Black Writers and the Development of Modern Outbreak Narratives (Becoming Modern: Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

An examination of early American literature that highlights how racial divides exacerbated-and were exacerbated by-the spread of infection In April of 1721, the HMS Seahorse arrived in Boston from the West Indies, causing a smallpox epidemic that would plague the city for the next year.Of its 12,000 inhabitants, nearly fifty percent were infected, and 900 people died.Like the coronavirus pandemic that began in 2020, the outbreak also brought to the surface deep divides in the social fabric of colonial New England and laid the groundwork for racialized political inequities that we continue to grapple with today. In Contagion’s Wake examines a range of American outbreak narratives, both historical and fictional, written between the early 1700s and the early 1900s-from the rise of inoculation through the advent of germ theory.Author Kelly L. Bezio argues that during this period, literature about communicable disease was dominated by white authors, such as Cotton Mather and Edgar Allen Poe