Creative Resilience and Covid-19: Figuring the Everyday in a Pandemic

Creative Resilience and COVID-19 examines arts, culture, and everyday life as a way of navigating through and past COVID-19. Drawing together the voices of international experts and emerging scholars, this volume explores themes of creativity and resilience in relation to the crisis, trauma, cultural alterity, and social change wrought by the pandemic.

The cultural, social, and political concerns that have arisen due to COVID-19 are inextricably intertwined with the ways the pandemic has been discussed, represented, and visualized in global media. The essays included in this volume are concerned with how artists, writers, and advocates uncover the hope, plasticity, and empowerment evident in periods of worldwide loss and struggle-factors which are critical to both overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic and fashioning the post-COVID-19 era. Elaborating on concepts of the everyday and the outbreak narrative, Creative Resilience and COVID-19 explores diverse themes including coping with the crisis through digital distractions, diary writing, and sounds; the unequal vulnerabilities of gender, ethnicity, and age; the role of visuality and creativity including comics and community theatre; and the hopeful vision for the future through urban placemaking, nighttime sociability, and cinema.

The book fills an important scholarly gap, providing foundational knowledge from the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic through a consideration of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In doing so, Creative Resilience and COVID-19 expands non-medical COVID-19 studies at the intersection of media and communication studies, cultural criticism, and the pandemic.

Irene Gammel is Professor of Art, Literature and Culture and Director of the Modern Literature and Culture (MLC) Centre at Ryerson University, Canada. Her research focuses on gender and modernity in literary and visual culture. She is author of I Can Only Paint: The Story of Battlefield Artist Mary Riter Hamilton (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020), Looking for Anne of Green Gables: The Story of Lucy Maud Montgomery and Her Literary Classic (St. Martin’s Press, 2008) and Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, andEveryday Modernity (MIT Press, 2002). She is also co-editor of Florine Stettheimer: New Directions in Multimodal Modernism (Book*hug, 2019), Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (MIT Press, 2011) and Crystal Flowers: Poetry and a Libretto by Florine Stettheimer (Book Thug, 2010). She cohosts the MLC Pandemic Webinar Series, which explores the social, cultural, and creative dimensions of the COVID-19 crisis through arts, humanities, and social sciences research by a network of international scholars.

Jason Wang is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre at Ryerson University, Canada. His research explores how modernist and contemporary literature and media encode power, politics, and social values. His doctoral dissertation, entitled Urban Walking: Configuring the Modern City as Cultural and Spatial Practice, explored the aesthetics of spatial politics and the politics of spatial aesthetics in urban literature and culture from the early twentieth century to the post-industrial era. He has contributed chapters to Florine Stettheimer: New Directions in Multimodal Modernism (Book*hug, 2019) and Confluences 2: Essays on the New Canadian Literature (Mawenzi House, 2017) as well as the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. He also cohosts the MLC Pandemic Webinar Series.