'This year, the retrospective glance of Journal of Commonwealth Literature’s Bibliographic Issue, from the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic to pre-pandemic creative and critical publications, opens up multiple questions of time and temporality. We look back at 2019 with the benefit of hindsight, anticipating literary responses to this crisis, dissociating ourselves from it so as to examine pre-Covid works in their own right, seeing it already prefigured in 2019 publications and events and negotiating the demands of writing and of access to published works within the polyphony of its multiple overlapping chronotopes, Bakhtinian time-spaces embodying historical, biographical and social contradictions, inequalities and struggles (Bakhtin 1975). We live in chronotopes of Covid’s origins and trajectories; its symptomaticity, development and complications; its nostalgias and neologisms; the recursive postponements it necessitates; its uneven spread, divisions and precariats; its global figurations and the planetary solidarities emerging in response; the stasis, escapism, isolation, trauma, sacrifice and mourning it has brought about alongside Bacchic rule-breaking and excess alongside the policing of the self, of the other and of the boundaries between them; its socially distant deaths and virtual synchronicities; its fragmentation into national temporalities; its impetus to international competitiveness; its dystopias, its conspiracy theories and the politically inflected allegories of the fight against it; the cyclicity of its waves; the curves and peaks of its rates of infection and the race towards the fulfilment of a utopian postCovid future, ranging from a return to pre-Covid times to a progression to a better, lessons-learned condition.' (Editorial introduction)
