ABSTRACT
In the 1970s, René Girard offered what is arguably the fi rst comprehensive effort to examine the plague in western literature. Girard opens “The Plague in Literature and Myth” by stating unequivocally that “The plague is found everywhere in literature.” He goes on to explain that it appears ubiquitously as a cluster of themes with plague at the center; in this way, plague “belongs to the epic with Homer, to tragedy with Oedipus Rex, to history with Thucydides, to the philosophical poem with Lucretius.”1 It is “universally presented as an undifferentiation, a destruction of specifi city. This destruction is often preceded by reversal” (833). These two themes of undifferentiation and reversal are followed by the fi nal theme in the cluster, which “may be the most important of all, the sacrifi cial element” (841), whereby a society uses a scapegoat to bring about an end to the disruptive reversal and undifferentiation. Citing examples from Shakespeare to Bergman, Girard fi nds the anxiety originally associated with plague visitations and reproduced thematically in this cluster to be made manifest even in works not explicitly about the plague.
