Article: From Oran to San Francisco: Shilts appropriates Camus. (Randy Shilts; Albert Camus)(Queer Utilities: Textual Studies, Theory, Pedagogy, Praxis)

Was not Camus's only fault, apart from being too widely read, that he was right too soon?

Bertrand Poirot-Delpech

Even before his narrative begins, Albert Camus offers a cue on how to read The Plague. He positions a statement by Daniel Defoe as epigraph to the entire work. Any novelist writing about epidemics bears the legacy of A Journal of the Plague Year, the 1722 text in which Defoe recounts the collective story of one city, in his case London, under the impact of a plague, and uses a narrator so self-effacing that his only concession to personal identity is the placement of his initials, H.F., at the very end. Camus's The Plague insists that it is the ...

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