Prevailing Pandemic:Vulnerability and Solidarity in Contemporary English and Chinese Fiction

This article frames contemporary English-language and Chinese pandemic fiction through a theoretical lens -- from Plato’s Timaeus and Sontag’s illness-as-metaphor to Butler’s account of precarious life -- to argue that literature operates as an ecological force. This force both reveals structural vulnerabilities and cultivates forms of solidarity across cultural and political divides, such as those between Euro-America and China. The article goes on to survey the contributions to this special issue, showing how pandemic narratives diagnose planetary precarity, contest nationalist and capitalist responses, and imagine dialogic practices for transnational solidarity in a post-Covid world.