Self-construction via Texts: COVID-19 and Child Fiction

ABSTRACT COVID-19 has re-shuffled human life in numerous ways. The ideology of restraint and social distancing is on top of all the changes gifted to mankind by the novel virus. In other words, social distancing as a “new normal” has become an established reality. In this context, the study aims at exploring the mechanics of construction of this “new-normal” via texts – literary and nonliterary. According to new historicism, texts and co-texts are employed by power as tools to build as well as restraint a particular ideology. This paper aims at showing the treatment of COVID-19 by the literary texts produced during this vast human crisis, particularly child fiction. It also re-validates the critique of new historicism in the under-discussion context. For this purpose, two short stories – Together by Kevin Poplawski and My Hero is You by UNICEF – have been analyzed in the backdrop of the political (nonliterary) discourse produced to combat COVID-19. The analysis, thus, finds the heavy reliance of world powers on literary and nonliterary discourses for the inclusion of the “new normative” of social distancing and personal care. It is also suggested that the pandemic has bestowed a relatively polite image to “power” due to its efforts to construct the “new normal” abiding selves and inoculate the “new normative of social distancing” that ultimately favors humanity.