This chapter examines how Bengali authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries use the mosquito to experiment with scale in fiction and poetry. Authors such as Rabindranāth Tagore, Trailokyanāth Mukhopadhyay, Annadāshankar Ray, and Tārāshankar Bandyopadhyāy question both Western medical perception and Western concepts of literary realism by stressing how malaria and mosquitoes escape neat categorizations of meaning. Furthermore, the mosquito in works of poetry and fantasy also shows the interconnection of medical, political, and environmental issues. This chapter uses postcolonial criticism, medical history, and methods drawn from the Health Humanities in order to engage the poetics and politics of Bengali literary interpretations of malaria. By so doing, it stresses the importance of non-Western perspectives to the study of literature and medicine, suggesting that scholarship engage the multiple medical value systems as well as literary traditions that reinterpret and subvert Western tenets of scientific thought.

The horror novel appears in the late twentieth century as a significant genre of popular fiction. Growing out of older traditions of the European Gothic and weird fiction, and their trajectory through American literature, the horror novel has produced some of the most famous names in writing, such as Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. Debates about the literary merits of horror have been frequent, but the genre undoubtedly holds an important place in fiction and in American culture more widely. The politics of the horror novel, then, are crucial. This chapter traces the history of critical commentary on the political position of horror, asking if it upholds or questions the status quo. It also moves beyond this model to examine modern transformations of the genre and self-conscious literary responses to the legacy of racism and misogyny that has been a subject of critique. Covering the horror novel’s response to varied social changes, including immigration, the sexual revolution, and the Civil Rights Movement, this chapter argues that it is capable of both reflecting on and exploiting social fears, and that its politics are as varied as its form, which has far more variety than narrow genre definitions might suggest.