“Is a Priest Justified in Consulting a Doctor?” Reflections on the Case of Paneloux and Rieux in The Plague, by Mark Orme.States of Plague, by Kaplan and Marris: An Overview and Review, by Robert C.Camus’s The Plague and the Health Humanities, by Robert C.Life Can Be the Plague: Camus’s Reification, by Susan Howard Moss.Heinlein’s short story “Sky Lift” in regards to each story’s differing response to an impending plague, but also explore the shared stance between the authors when it comes to the nature of human responsibility.įollowing these four Critical Context essays is the Critical Readings section of this book, which contains the following essays: Heinlein’s ‘Sky Lift’,” McGiveron compares Camus’s The Plague and Robert A. In the next essay, “’A Grim-Jawed Angel of Mercy’ or ‘There’s No Question of Heroism in All This’? Crisis and Response in Albert Camus’s The Plague and Robert A. Mcgiveron respectively. The first, “‘From Thucydides to Simone Weil: Friendship and Heroism in Albert Camus’s The Plague,” compares Camus’s two novels The Stranger and The Plague, especially in how the main protagonist confronts their struggles whether in solitude or seeking out help from others, and how these decisions impact them later on in the story. The following two essays are written by Edwin Wong and Rafeeq O. Evans, “The Earliest American Newspaper Reviews of Albert Camus’s The Plague,” This essay explores early reviews of The Plague in American newspapers and the importance of such reviews once the book was translated into English from French. This section opens with an essay by Maciej Kałuża titled, “Benefitting from Plague in Camus’s The Plague ” followed by a piece by Robert C. And by comparing and contrasting it with another important work.Evans.Ī collection of six critical contexts essays are intended to treat the novel This is followed by a Biography of Albert Camus written by volume editor Robert C. It begins with an introductory “About This Volume” essay, followed by another work titled “Camus and Plague Literature,” by Rebecca Totaro. This volume, like all others in the Critical Insights series, is divided into several sections. As an advocate for personal integrity despite an absence of religious or philosophical meaning, Camus became a spokesman for the generation that had witnessed the Holocaust and other horrors of World War II.

On one level a simple tale of the universal, ultimately unwinnable, struggle against death, The Plague also explores individual moral courage, secular and religious, in the face of overwhelming tragedy.

Considered a classic of the existentialist movement (though Camus objected to this label), scholars have long engaged with the novel’s absurdist elements.

The stranger and the plague