SOURCE: "The Plague Narratives of Defoe and Camus: Illness as Metaphor," in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 3, September, 1987, pp. 223-41.

In the following essay, Stephanson elucidates the differing symbolic functions served by the plague in two novels: Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year and Albert Camus's The Plague.

In her essay Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag writes:

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor. Then, in the name of the disease (that is, using it as a metaphor), that horror is imposed on other things. The disease becomes adjectival.

Sontag's essay explores the ways in which tuberculosis in the nineteenth century and cancer in the twentieth have had "the widest possibilities as...