Elizabeth Wein's The Sunbird/The Lion Hunter/The Empty Kingdom deal with the political effects of plague in medieval Ethiopia -- the POV is from characters in cities that have imposed a quarantine on the cities where the plague is present, so there isn't much description of the plague itself.
M.T. Anderson's Octavian Nothing I: The Pox Party spends a substantial section on the smallpox during the Revolutionary War.
Louise Erdrich's The Birchbark House starts off with an Ojibwe village almost entirely killed off by disease (I think smallpox?) and there is a later recurrence of it in the book. (children's book, historical, Native American writer and characters.)
I believe Marguerite Yourcenar's The Abyss (medieval Europe, the study of natural philosophy) and "Anna, Soror ..." (in Two Lives and A Dream) both have sections dealing with plague, but I may be misremembering.
Not read, but relevant: John Edgar Wideman, The Cattle Killing: Amazon description: "Set in Philadelphia in 1793, when the city was afflicted by an epidemic of yellow fever, Wideman's novel is narrated by a young black preacher whose mind seems unhinged by the terrible events he is witnessing. His apocalyptic visions reflect the confusion and delirium around him. The rich white citizens of the city are mostly shutting themselves in and sending their black servants out into the fever-ridden streets. One prominent historical figure, Dr. Benjamin Rush (Dr. Thrush in the novel), is portrayed in a very ambivalent relationship with a black servant girl. Wideman, who has dealt in a more documentary style with the epidemic in a previous collection of short stories, Fever, here combines vision, hallucination, dream, and African legend in a complex metaphorical novel."
Laurie Halse Anderson's Fever 1793 deals with the same outbreak as the Wideman, in a YA historical novel about a white servant girl.
no subject
M.T. Anderson's Octavian Nothing I: The Pox Party spends a substantial section on the smallpox during the Revolutionary War.
Louise Erdrich's The Birchbark House starts off with an Ojibwe village almost entirely killed off by disease (I think smallpox?) and there is a later recurrence of it in the book. (children's book, historical, Native American writer and characters.)
I believe Marguerite Yourcenar's The Abyss (medieval Europe, the study of natural philosophy) and "Anna, Soror ..." (in Two Lives and A Dream) both have sections dealing with plague, but I may be misremembering.
Not read, but relevant: John Edgar Wideman, The Cattle Killing: Amazon description: "Set in Philadelphia in 1793, when the city was afflicted by an epidemic of yellow fever, Wideman's novel is narrated by a young black preacher whose mind seems unhinged by the terrible events he is witnessing. His apocalyptic visions reflect the confusion and delirium around him. The rich white citizens of the city are mostly shutting themselves in and sending their black servants out into the fever-ridden streets. One prominent historical figure, Dr. Benjamin Rush (Dr. Thrush in the novel), is portrayed in a very ambivalent relationship with a black servant girl. Wideman, who has dealt in a more documentary style with the epidemic in a previous collection of short stories, Fever, here combines vision, hallucination, dream, and African legend in a complex metaphorical novel."
Laurie Halse Anderson's Fever 1793 deals with the same outbreak as the Wideman, in a YA historical novel about a white servant girl.