SOURCE: "A Methodology of Thematics: The Literature of the Plague," in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1, March, 1982, pp. 39-53.

In the following essay, Kurman perceives common elements in six works in which a plague is prominently featured in the narrative.

Should an alert and omnivorous modern reader chance to reconsider comparatively the Old Babylonian Atrahasis Epic and the first book of Samuel (chapters 4-7); book seven of Ovid's Metamorphoses and Pearl Buck's The Good Earth; Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, it would soon occur to her, among other things, that all six texts deal, in substantial part, with plague. But what is she subsequently to make of such a connection, beyond merely noting it?

Fortunately for the essay at hand, upon reflection plague turns out not to be the only common thematic element uniting these six otherwise quite diverse texts: our hypothetical reader...