Chronicles of Psychological Resilience: A Study of Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague and Mohamed Diab Ghazzawi’s Love in the Time of Corona

Abstract

The paper aims to analyze the texts of Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague and (2001) Ghazzawi’s poetry collection Love in The Time of Corona (2021) as outlines of people’s responses to pandemics. This is reached through relying heavily on the theories of trauma and psychological resilience. The former refers broadly to experiences of fear and uncertainty that can be extremely stressful, while the latter is, generally conceived to be the way people positively respond to such stressful situations. The theoretical framework of this paper addresses trauma, people’s different responses to traumatic events, the definition of resilience, and the factors that help people be resilient. Eventually, this paper aims to highlight the role of literature in informing people how to react when faced with pandemics such as corona virus. It concludes that both texts, two different literary genres written by opposing genders, portrayed traumatic experiences that ended positively through adopting some coping mechanisms. Each text shows different sets of protective factors against potentially traumatic events, but in general, social support, religious/ spiritual commitment, making meaning of life, hardiness, and solution seeking are the most common means to show psychological resilience.

Keywords: COVID-19, Corona, Resilience, Trauma, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague, Love in the Time of Corona.

Highlights:

1. The paper uniquely compares two distinct literary genres (a novel and a poetry collection) from different cultural contexts (English/Australian and Arabic/Egyptian) written by authors of different genders, focusing on their portrayal of pandemic responses.

2- The paper can be seen as a primary contribution demonstrating how literature (both prose and poetry) serves as a valuable guide, informing readers on how to react and build resilience during pandemics like COVID-19.

3- The paper contributes the insight that the use of dark humor, specifically identified in the Egyptian poetry collection, reflects a distinct cultural coping strategy (attributed to Egyptians) for dealing with adversity.

4- The paper is a trans-disciplinary study as it employs psychological theories of trauma (experiences of fear, uncertainty, stress) and resilience (positive adaptation to adversity) as its core theoretical framework to analyze literary texts.

5- The paper underscores that resilience is not uniform; individuals react differently to the same trauma due to varying innate traits, circumstances, and perspectives, advocating for patience and a non-judgmental approach.

6- The paper concludes that literature provides a deeper, more humane, compassionate, and sincere understanding of pandemic experiences and resilience, surpassing the insights offered by purely scientific or statistical approaches