Encounters with the Plague in Homer, Sophocles, and Thucydides

Encounters with the Plague in Homer, Sophocles, and Thucydides explores three of the earliest, and most influential, accounts of plague visitations in Western literature: Homer's Iliad book 1 (1-487), Sophocles' Oedipus the King (esp. 1-215), and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War book 2 (esp. 47.3-54).

The question at the core of this study is how a destructive force within narrative becomes a creative force for narrative itself: both in terms of the formation of narrative and in...