A Study Of Cholera Writing In Western Novels In The 19th-20th Centuries

In the past two or three years,due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic,people’s attention to infectious diseases has increased,and the interdisciplinary interactive research between literature and plague has become more active.Looking back at the development history of human civilization,there must be a history of fighting against diseases.Cholera is one of the most terrifying pandemics in human history,known for its rapid spread,wide range and high fatality rate.Most of its epidemic times were in the 19 th century,so the 19 th century is also known as "the century of Cholera".In the 19th-20 th centuries,cholera became a part of people’s life experience,and therefore became an important theme of literary writing.In this paper,works born during the cholera era in the past 200 years,such as Bleak House,Middlemarch,The Secret Garden,and the Sphinx,and works symbolically represented by cholera,such as The Plague King and The Masque of the Red Death,as well as works with cholera as an important writing element,such as The Painted Veil,EI Amor En Los Tiempos Del Colera,Horseman on the Roof and Death in Venice,a total of 10 works have been studied.The interdisciplinary study of literature and other disciplines is one of the research directions of comparative literature,and the interdisciplinary interaction between literature and pathology is an important symbol of this direction.This article takes cholera as a research element,and takes representative works related to cholera in the 19 th and 20 th centuries as the main research object,analyzing the presentation of cholera in novels of this era reflects the significance of interdisciplinary research on comparative literature.This article first analyzes the causes of cholera writing,and answers why cholera images frequently appeared in the two hundred years of the 19 th and 20 th centuries.Cholera is a kind of plague,so the important plague writings in the history of Western literature have been sorted out.These two hundred cholera writings are also to inherit the tradition.Combined with the history of cholera,according to medical research on the occurrence of cholera,the spread of cholera in history confirms that it was during this period that cholera spread widely around the world.Analyzing the personal experience of writers who lived in this period proves that cholera occurred frequently in this period.Secondly,write the narrative strategy of cholera,and study how cholera is presented in the novel.Select representative angles from selected specific texts for research.Cholera as a disease is inseparable from patients,doctors and other related figures,who take on the presence of all beings when cholera occurs.Because cholera plays different roles in the novel,the writers adopt different narrative perspectives.Finally,the spatial theory is used to analyze the different impacts of cholera in different spatial levels.Study the metaphor of cholera again.Not only is cholera an epidemic,but it has already surpassed its own meaning and has been endowed with a variety of metaphors.It mainly discusses five aspects of social class,love,colonization,culture,and war,and explore the multiple meanings of cholera in the novel.Finally,the aesthetic study of cholera.The purpose of people writing about the disease is to transcend the disease.Cholera is not only a terrible infectious disease,but also an aesthetic object.The romantic or pessimistic writing of cholera is to give People’s courage in the face of accidents and death.This article selects representative works about cholera in western novels in the 19 th and 20 th centuries,and comprehensively shows why and how people wrote about cholera in this period,using classic narrative theory,space theory,metaphor research,and aesthetic research Etc.Combined with specific works to analyze the impact of the plague on human society,in order to draw people’s attention to novels related to the epidemic,and give greater play to the healing and reflection functions of such novels.