Author ORCID Identifier:
Date of Graduation
5-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts in English (MA)
Degree Level
Graduate
Department
English
Advisor/Mentor
Stephens, Dorothy
Committee Member
Haydar, Adrian
Second Committee Member
Long, Mary Beth
Keywords
Black Death; Christian Traditions; Islamic Studies; Islamic Traditions; Plague Literature; Trauma Studies
Abstract
This thesis examines how Arabic and English literary and intellectual traditions responded to the Black Death as a shared yet differently articulated experience of collective trauma. Drawing on trauma theory, particularly the work of Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra, it analyzes how plague narratives function as cultural mechanisms for processing mass suffering. Through a comparative study of Arabic historiographical, theological, medical, and poetic texts alongside English allegorical, mystical, autobiographical, and satirical writings, this project argues that both traditions developed distinct narrative strategies to render the trauma of plague intelligible. Arabic plague literature, represented by figures such as Ibn Khaldūn, Ibn al-Khaṭīb, Ibn Ḥajar, al-Maqrīzī, and Ibn al-Wardī, tends toward synthesis, continuity, and ethical reasoning, constructing a cumulative archive that integrates empirical observation with theological interpretation. In contrast, English texts by authors such as John Lydgate, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Thomas Dekker more often externalize trauma through allegory, visionary experience, affective expression, and urban satire. Rather than framing this distinction as a binary between rationality and emotion, the thesis argues that both traditions employ culturally specific “trauma technologies” that convert the incomprehensible into communicable forms. In addition, this study situates plague writing within broader frameworks of cultural memory and narrative form, and this demonstrates that the Black Death operates as a universal crisis that demands representation, while the modes of that representation remain shaped by religious, intellectual, and institutional contexts. Ultimately, the thesis shows that narrative is not only reflective but constitutive: it enables societies to survive, interpret, and transmit the experience of catastrophe across generations.
Citation
Aldaoseri, Z. A. (2026). Writing Through the Plague: Memory, Trauma, and Survival in Arabic and English Narrative. Graduate Theses and Dissertations Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/6176
