Cooke Jennifer. Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory and Film

Palgrave, 2009. — 256 p.Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory and Film is an account of the history and continuation of plague as a potent metaphor since the disease ceased to be an epidemic threat in Western Europe. Moving across narrative, theatre, political discourse, psychoanalysis and film theory, the book engages with twentieth-century critiques of fascism, anti-Semitic rhetoric, the Oedipal legacy of psychoanalysis and its reception, film spectatorship and the zombie genre. Plague's legacies lie in our dreams, our fears and in language itself. They reveal the fragility of the social bond; the fascination of diseased spectacle; and the literal and metaphorical power of pestilence. Legacies of Plague highlights the way in which structures of ritual surrounding the contagious and what is tabo, while they may have been practically supplanted, are still operative under new guises in recent and present discourse and can be used to label and stigmatise in powerful and disturbing ways.