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This work raises the study of creativity and creative processes as a relevant field for the sociological Social Psychology. In this way, the main goal of this work is to consider the creativity and the creative process as social processes. Considering therefore the need to analyse them in the social-cultural-historical context in which they occur, thus opening a new scenario to think about creativity and the creative process in the present time. In this new scenario, the dominant forms of knowledge circulation based on an individualizing 'ontology of creative works' are no longer unique. And their pertinence and legitimacy can be re-raised in the present time. In this way, this work also argues that different forms of knowledge circulation mean different socio-political implications. Thus, to specify and to consider them as a choice in terms of knowledge production, allows us to problematize them from the standpoint of creator/ producer and from the creative process' standpoint.

This editorial is not about pandemics. Or not only. After a long year, when most predictions about how society would change turned out to be wrong —or were revealed as mere wishful thinking—, if one thing has become clear it is the perennial difficulty, as Walker Kaplan noted in a recent article in LitHub (2020), of writing "about the swamp while still being waist-deep in it". Experiences of social and political unrest, trauma, or crises in the broadest sense "need time to percolate" and it is usually easier to look at them from a distance, obliquely, or with some measure of historical perspective (Power, 2020). And this applies to fiction as well as to historical, sociological or political analyses. In other words, the challenges of the last year are compounded by the difficulty of accurately diagnosing the present because, as the philosopher Patricia Manrique notes, faced with the novelty of a "crisis" the usual reflex is to interpret it within the parameters of the already known. We tend to appeal to tired tropes and dull meanings, for example our understanding of "time" and "crisis", in our attempt to name that which does not yet have a name. In these brief introductory notes, I turn to these three concepts —contemporaneity, crisis, time— as a means of providing a framework for approaching the eight articles that make up this monographic dossier. In their examination of literary texts that traverse the long twentieth century and reach into the twenty-first, they span almost a century, from Virginia Woolf's first modernist novel, published in 1922, to works published as recently as 2019.