Camus's The Plague: Philosophical Perspectives

La Peste (in English The Plague), originally published in 1947 by the Nobel Prize-winning writer Albert Camus, chronicles the progression of deadly bubonic plague as it spreads through the quarantined Algerian city of Oran. While most discussions of fictional examples within aesthetics are either historical or hypothetical, Camus offers an example of “pestilence fiction.”

Camus chose fiction to convey facts—about plagues in the past, his own bout with tuberculosis at age seventeen, living u...