pandeemiad

Pandeemiad is a term used in contemporary literary criticism to describe a long-form narrative work that centers on a pandemic and its social, political, and cultural consequences. The coinage blends pandemic with the -iad suffix found in epic titles such as Iliad, signaling a comprehensive, multi-part account rather than a single piece. The term is not widely standardized and appears mainly in scholarly discourse that emerged in the late 2010s and early 2020s, particularly in response to COVID-19 and other public health crises.

In form, a pandeemiad can take poetry, prose, or hybrid media, often organized as an episodic sequence that maps time across a crisis period and its aftermath. Its methods may include documentary detail, testimony, meditation, satire, and narrative reflection. Themes commonly explored include mortality and care, inequality, governance and science, memory and collective trauma, and the ethics of representation.

Critics debate the label’s usefulness, arguing that it risks flattening diverse pandemic-themed works into a single category, while others see it as a productive way to describe a new mode of art that records extraordinary disruption. While there are no universally canonical pandeemiads, critics frequently discuss pandemic memoirs, poetry cycles, and multimedia projects published in the 2020s as forming a loose family of works that some characterize as pandeemiads.

See also: pandemic literature; epic; documentary poetry; memory studies.