Modern and contemporary literature has described or imagined contagions capable of upsetting the pre-existing social order or of revealing, in a traumatic form, the actual political-cultural logics. The book analyzes some significant texts in this light and therefore explores, with particular attention, works by Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Alessandro Manzoni, M.P. Shiel, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, Raoul Maria De Angelis, Curzio Malaparte, Gesualdo Bufalino, Richard Matheson, Per Wahlöö, Jorge Amado, Guido Morselli, Primo Levi, Gabriel García Márquez, José Saramago, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, Franz Kafka and Fëdor Dostoevskij, always wondering how these works have portrayed the relationship between community and constituted power in situations of widespread public emergency. All this, also to obtain additional elements of evaluation on the way in which, for almost two years, we have been facing a new, terrible pandemic: COVID-19.