“Chronicles of Resilience: A Study of Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague and Mohamed Diab Ghazzawi’s Love in the Time of Corona.”

Abstract

The paper aims to analyze the texts of Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague and (2001) Ghazzawi’s poetry collection Love in The Time of Corona (2021) as outlines of people’s responses to pandemics. This is reached through relying heavily on the theories of trauma and psychological resilience. The former refers broadly to experiences of fear and uncertainty that can be extremely stressful, while the latter is, generally conceived to be the way people positively respond to such stressful situations. The theoretical framework of this paper addresses trauma, people’s different responses to traumatic events, the definition of resilience, and the factors that help people be resilient. Eventually, this paper aims to highlight the role of literature in informing people how to react when faced with pandemics such as corona virus. It concludes that both texts, two different literary genres written by opposing genders, portrayed traumatic experiences that ended positively through adopting some coping mechanisms. Each text shows different sets of protective factors against potentially traumatic events, but in general, social support, religious/ spiritual commitment, making meaning of life, hardiness, and solution seeking are the most common means to show psychological resilience.