How should we understand the fear and fascination elicited by the accounts of communicable disease outbreaks that proliferated, following the emergence of HIV, in scientific publications and the mainstream media? The repetition of particular characters, images, and story lines of Patients Zero and superspreaders, hot zones and tenacious microbes produced a formulaic narrative as they circulated through the media and were amplified in popular fiction and film. The outbreak narrative begins with the identification of an emerging infection, follows it through the global networks of contact and...

How should we understand the fear and fascination elicited by the accounts of communicable disease outbreaks that proliferated, following the emergence of HIV, in scientific publications and the mainstream media? The repetition of particular characters, images, and story lines of Patients Zero and superspreaders, hot zones and tenacious microbes produced a formulaic narrative as they circulated through the media and were amplified in popular fiction and film. The outbreak narrative begins with the identification of an emerging infection, follows it through the global networks of contact and...

Ever since the founders drafted "We the People," "we" have been at pains to work out the contradictions in their formulation, to fix in words precisely what it means to be American. "Constituting Americans" rethinks the way that certain writers of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century contributed to this project; in doing so, it revises the traditional narrative of U.S. literary history, restoring an essential chapter to the story of an emerging American cultural identity. In diverse ways, very different writers including Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Harriet Wilson, W. E. B....