A criatividade como força tensora em tempos pandémicos: consonâncias e dissonâncias entre o Diário da Peste (Gonçalo M. Tavares) e o Diário da Peste de Londres (Daniel Defoe)

Resumo

Drawing on the concepts of “melancholy”, “tragic”, “classic” and “contemporary”, we propose to make a comparative reading between the Plague Diary, written by Gonçalo M. Tavares, and The London Plague Diary, drafted by Daniel Defoe, precursor of the modern English novel, outlining mainly some considerations on the following points: 1) melancholy as an engine of literary creativity and as an inspiring state of mind in pandemic times; 2) the dimension - both temporal and literary - of the two works, one of which, Gonçalo M. Tavares, includes a universal register, while the other circumscribes its narrative to a single city; 3) to point out, finally, convergences and divergences, and also try to identify the presence of one text in the other, explaining the “relational character of all meaning” (Buescu, 2001) also reflecting on the timeless nature of Defoe’s work and explaining why it can be considered a classic in the Calvinian sense.