• Editors' IntroductionMore Than a Virus
• Cherie Lacey and Annemarie Jutel

When we first started thinking about this Special Issue in our home country of New Zealand, we had little sense of what the future might hold. Emerging from a very strict lockdown—where one of us found herself in an isolated rural community, unable to return home, and the other was confined to a small suburban space with a dog, two children under the age of five, and a husband, and both of us with doubts as to what our jobs would look like when we were "released"—our minds were strictly focused on the pandemic and its immediate impact on our day-to-day lives.

At the same time, in the unfamiliar context of isolation, we connected with a colleague from Edinburgh, Michael Kelly—someone Annemarie knew from sabbatical trips and conferences, but with whom she had never worked. Enquiring first about his health and circumstances, the two started chatting from afar. Cherie joined in, and instead of fretting about the difficulty of undertaking research activities during lockdown, together we ended up writing a paper comparing the metaphors implemented to refer to the pandemic in our various media settings [End Page 295] (Lacey, Kelly, and Jutel 2020). We went on to author other papers together, and to establish a new research relationship.

In August 2020, after submitting this first paper, and well before any country was out of the woods with regards to the pandemic (New Zealand included), the idea that we might consider COVID-19 as a shared experience gave us pause and pushed us to develop this special issue. We wanted to explore the dialectic of commonality in the experience of the pandemic. In our own email communications, our narratives moved between intensely felt personal anecdotes that highlighted the pleasures, stresses, joys, and breaking points in each of our own lives, and a sense that we were living through what was, perhaps, the most universal of any event in modern history.

The political rhetoric of the year almost universally relied on a narrative of common experience. But, although a sense of shared experience may be a fundamental human need—and indeed may help us to get through a crisis as it unfolds—the longer-lasting meanings of our "common experience" and what it required of us remains elusive. These past 18 or so months have seen an abundance of essays that try to make meaning of the pandemic experience. Often, these essays move between highly personal experiences—the domestic minutiae of lockdown life—and an awareness of the lines of shared humanity that cross-cross the globe, drawing it close.

Of all the wonderful essays that have been written during this period, Zadie Smith's "Something to Do," from her slim collection of six pandemic essays, Intimations (2020), is a favorite. In "Something to Do," Smith reflects on the experience of trying to work in a household in which her husband is also a writer and with a four-year-old child to look after in lockdown. In what is by far the best simile we have encountered in pandemic writing, Smith reflects on what might best be described as the collective madness that drove those of us who are nonessential workers to keep trying to work and write, even as the world fell apart around us: "What strikes me at once is how conflicted we feel about this new liberty and/or captivity. On the one hand, like pugs who have been lifted out of a body of water, our little legs keep pumping on, as they did when we were hurrying off to our workplaces. Do we know how to stop?" (22) Smith's essay takes us into her domestic space and describes the pandemic from a perspective which can only be her own. Despite the fact that Smith and her husband Nick Laird happen to be two of the most respected writers on the planet in our current moment, somehow Smith's experience also feels very much like ours. Like Smith, we were also compelled keep writing and working, pug-out-of-water-like, during the lockdown period. Perhaps the drive to keep...

• 编辑介绍不仅仅是病毒
• 切丽·莱西和安妮玛丽·朱特尔

当我们第一次在我们的祖国新西兰开始考虑这个特刊时，我们几乎不知道未来会发生什么。摆脱了非常严格的封锁——我们中的一个人发现自己身处一个与世隔绝的农村社区，无法回家，另一个人被限制在郊区的一个小空间里，带着一只狗、两个五岁以下的孩子和一个丈夫，我们俩都怀疑“释放”后我们的工作会是什么样子——我们的注意力完全集中在大流行及其对我们日常生活的直接影响上。

与此同时，在陌生的孤立环境中，我们与来自爱丁堡的同事迈克尔凯利取得了联系——安妮玛丽在休假旅行和会议中认识的人，但她从未与之共事过。两人先是询问了他的身体状况，远远的聊了起来。Cherie 加入了进来，而不是担心在锁定期间进行研究活动的困难，我们最终一起写了一篇论文，比较了在我们的各种媒体环境中为指代大流行而实施的隐喻[End Page 295]（Lacey、Kelly 和朱特尔 2020）。我们继续共同撰写其他论文，并建立了新的研究关系。

2020 年 8 月，在提交第一篇论文之后，在任何国家（包括新西兰）摆脱大流行之前，我们可能将 COVID-19 视为一种共同经历的想法让我们停下来并推动了我们开发这个特殊的问题。我们想在大流行的经历中探索共性的辩证法。在我们自己的电子邮件通信中，我们的叙述在强烈感受到的个人轶事之间移动，这些轶事突出了我们每个人生活中的乐趣、压力、喜悦和突破点，以及我们正在经历的感觉，也许是最普遍的现代历史上的任何事件。

今年的政治言论几乎普遍依赖于对共同经历的叙述。但是，尽管共享经验的感觉可能是人类的基本需求——并且确实可以帮助我们度过危机，但我们“共同经验”的更持久意义及其对我们的要求仍然难以捉摸。在过去的 18 个月左右的时间里，有大量文章试图解释大流行的经历。通常，这些文章在高度个人化的经历——封闭生活的家庭细节——和对跨越全球的共同人性线的认识之间移动，将其拉近。

在此期间所写的所有精彩文章中，扎迪·史密斯 (Zadie Smith) 的“有事可做”，来自她的六篇大流行文章的精巧合集，Intimations(2020)，是最爱。在“有事可做”中，史密斯回顾了她试图在一个丈夫也是一名作家的家庭中工作的经历，她有一个四岁的孩子需要在隔离期间照顾。在迄今为止我们在流行病写作中遇到的最好的比喻中，史密斯反思了可能最好被描述为集体疯狂的事情，这种疯狂驱使我们这些非必要工人继续努力工作和写作，即使世界分崩离析在我们周围：“让我立刻感到震惊的是我们对这种新的自由和/或囚禁感到多么矛盾。一方面，就像从水体中被提起的哈巴狗一样，我们的小腿不断地泵着，因为它们”我们赶去上班的时候做的。我们知道如何停下来吗？(22) 史密斯 这篇文章将我们带入了她的家庭空间，并从只能属于她自己的角度描述了这场流行病。尽管史密斯和她的丈夫尼克莱尔德恰好是我们当前这个星球上最受尊敬的两位作家，但不知何故，史密斯的经历也与我们的经历非常相似。像史密斯一样，我们也被迫在封锁期间继续写作和工作，就像在水中拔地而起。也许是为了保持...