This volume explores Anglophone lockdown literature, an emerging genre significantly influenced by narratives that spawned during the COVID-19 pandemic, here tentatively defined as literature encompassing pandemic-related themes: the human condition under isolation and prevention measures, as well as the anxieties, fears, uncertainties and future hopes. The contributions included in this volume discuss the various paradigms — cultural, social, economic, medical, and political — of past and present pandemics in literatures in English, examining fear, suffering, social transformations, cultural beliefs, social hierarchies, vulnerabilities, modernisation of the medical profession, and dystopian visions of the pandemic.

Armela Panajoti is a visiting professor at the University of the Balearic Islands, Spain. She is the Chair of the Albanian Society for the Study of English (ASSE), general editor of its journal, in esse: English Studies in Albania and a member of the Board of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE).

Angelika Reichmann is a professor at Károly Eszterházy Catholic University, Eger, Hungary. She has authored two monographs on Dostoevsky in intertextual contexts. Since 2020, she has been co-editor of the Eger Journal of English Studies.