'A genre which has positioned itself as offering one of the most direct and comprehensive responses to a 2020 lived under the sign of the Covid pandemic is the anthology. The year was imagined and discussed in collections of graphic fiction from Aotearoa New Zealand, poetry from East Africa and India, stories from India and Pakistan, essays from South Africa, poetry and art from Malaysia and around the world and multi-genre work from Australia exploring the pandemic as the third in a row of devastating calamities afflicting the country, following firestorms and floods. Anthologies, in Barbara Benedict’s analysis, predicate themselves on “variety and dialogic exchange” to articulate “different responses to common events and feelings” and facilitate “sociability” (2003: 243), but are marked by a series of paradoxes: (literary) historicity and contemporaneity; communality and elitism; heteroglossia and homogeneity. They profess multiple authorship but are “stamped with the authority of the editor”; in A Pamphlet against Anthologies (1928), modernist poets Laura Riding and Robert Graves dubbed them a “publisher’s genre” (Benedict, 2003: 246), condemning their often thematic principle of organisation, where all poems about larks, for instance, can be muddled together, levelling up quality. Anthologies claim to be the expression of a community, but often create it themselves. They continue to underlie canon formation, to shape the discipline of literary criticism and to invite a repeated “dip, sip and skip” method of reading which parallels the editorial/scholarly processes of selection, criticality and the construction of a hierarchy of merit (2003: 242–237). At the same time, however, anthologies have been celebrated as a “reader’s genre” (anthology becomes synonymous with reader in one of the latter word’s modern meanings), as having provided literary movements with “definition and visibility” and as inviting non-linear readings of literary history (2003: 254). (Vassilena Parashkevova : Editorial introduction)
'In a publishing feat, the anthology Fire, Flood, Plague: Australian Writers Respond to 2020 appeared in the December of the very year it was responding to. Editor Sophie Cunningham brought together 25 essays originally published on the Guardian Australia website. She writes in her introduction:
as the new year dawned — violent, smoky — there were bushfires to contend with, then air quality so dangerous my … loved ones were trapped in their house. Soon enough there were hailstorms smashing into their workplaces. More fires, floods, then the plague. On it went. We understood that summer fires followed by late summer floods were considered to be part of the cascading effect of climate change. We understood that deforestation led to an increased likelihood of pandemics, but frankly, people can’t look every which way all at once and anyway it seemed that the genie was out of the bottle, the cat was out of the bag, the tipping point had tipped and now we were in the territory of the unprecedented, the territory of pivoting, the territory of grief and loss.'
(Introduction)
