Richards Presents Lecture for COVID-19 in Context Course

Professor Gary Richards delivered a lecture for UMW’s COVID-19 in Context summer 2020 course. His lecture addressed literature’s ability to speak to readers at moments of cultural uncertainty and provide them with models of how imagined others have dealt with similar crises. The lecture examined in particular U.S. fiction to see how novels dealing with the end of the Civil War (William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind), the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression (John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath), and Hurricane Katrina (Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones) may resonate with and even inspire contemporary readers during COVID-19. Richards’ lecture is available online.