Introduction

The coronavirus pandemic that began in late 2019 and that merged with other catastrophic global conditions to create a syndemic (see Cynthia J. Davis’s note) has brought changes beyond our comprehension. Pandemic-inspired articles, novels, stories, poems, blogs, tweets, videos, songs, and artwork are being produced at a prodigious rate as we try to make sense of what we all have, to varying degrees, witnessed and experienced for the last two years and continue to confront with no clear end in sight. In this “Of Note” section we hear from two literary scholars, Davis and Stuti Goswami, who have been writing about the body, medicine, pain, and the deleterious effects of disease and other maladies for some time and who now offer their insights into how this pandemic resembles and differs from previous global health calamities. Their contributions revolve in turn around recently published work on the pandemic by other scholars,...