%0 Journal Article
%@ 2052-5397
%A Baker, Emily
%A Beasley-Murray, Tim
%D 2023
%F discovery:10159243
%J Modern Languages Open
%N 1
%T Unmasking the Red Death: Introduction
%U https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10159243/
%V 2023
%X During the so-called High Lockdown in the UK (March to June 2020) a group of staff and students from University College London’s School of European Languages and Cultures (SELCS) gathered weekly for a Summer Book Club (SBC) to discuss works as diverse as Thomas Mann’s epic tale of convalescence and philosophical exploration The Magic Mountain and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s captivating comparison of the experience of race in Nigeria, the UK, and the US in Americanah. Among the true “pandemic-lit” that we chose to focus on was Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”. In discussing this tale, we could not help noticing the parallels between ourselves and Prince Prospero and his courtiers, who—in the face of devastating disease sweeping the realm—devoted themselves to aesthetic pleasures within their castellated abbey, just as we too found refuge in (closed) community and culture. Another of our book choices revealed a similar and uncanny parallel: in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven a band of actors and musicians roam a devastated America, putting on Shakespeare for the survivors of another deadly pandemic. Their motto, “Because survival is not sufficient”, a quotation from Star Trek, chimed with our sense too that, in the face of the pandemic, culture had a central role.
%Z © 2023 The Author(s). This is an  open-access article distributed  under the terms of the Creative  Commons Attribution 4.0  International License (CC-BY  4.0), which permits unrestricted  use, distribution, and  reproduction in any medium,  provided the original author  and source are credited. See  http://creativecommons.org/  licenses/by/4.0/.