Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature

Elizabeth Outka

Published by Columbia University Press 2019

Viral Modernism

The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature

Elizabeth Outka

In the series Modernist Latitudes

https://doi.org/10.7312/outk18574

Overview
Contents

About this book

Viral Modernism reveals the literary and cultural impact of one of the deadliest plagues in history, the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919, bringing to light how it shaped canonical works of fiction and poetry. Elizabeth Outka shows how and why the contours of modernism shift when we account for the pandemic’s hidden but widespread presence.

Author / Editor information

Elizabeth Outka is associate professor of English at the University of Richmond. She is the author of Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic (2009).

Reviews

Celia Marshik, author of At the Mercy of Their Clothes: Modernism, the Middlebrow, and British Garment Culture:
Viral Modernism navigates deftly between history and literature and presents transformative readings of some of the most canonical high modernist works. Along the way, Elizabeth Outka offers a moving and harrowing account of the challenges the influenza pandemic posed to those who lived through it. Readers will talk about this book with friends and family, and the field will never be able to ignore the pandemic again. An extraordinary achievement.

Stephen Kern, author of The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918:
Viral Modernism is an elegantly written, penetrating study of how the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 shaped modernist literature and society, most notably in Clarissa’s illnesses in Mrs. Dalloway; the burning thirst and drowning in The Waste Land; and the influence of Yeats’s stricken, pregnant wife as he wrote “The Second Coming.”

Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative:
How and why, asks Elizabeth Outka, have we missed “the viral tragedy within iconic modernist texts”? And what do we learn when we listen for it? Viral Modernism resuscitates the buried stories of the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic in relation to modernist literary form. The voices that surface through the exquisite readings of this well-researched, well-argued study offer insight not only into the tragic experience of this devastating disease but also into how those affected use literary and cultural forms to make sense of that experience, hence into the nature of storytelling itself.

Sarah Cole, author of Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century:
Elizabeth Outka answers a question that has hardly been asked, let alone answered: where is the flu in modernism? It is one of those books whose importance is written into its DNA. Adjusting our eyes so that we can see the shadowy presence of the pandemic, Outka gives us a new vision of modernism, vulnerable and embodied. Steeped in a rich and riveting archive, Viral Modernism offers transformative insights into the motivation and meaning of modernist texts, attuning us to the troubling ways illness can disappear from our cultural memory.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Chapter One. INTRODUCING THE PANDEMIC Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I. Pandemic Realism: Making an Atmosphere Visible
Chapter Two. Untangling War and Plague Willa Cather and Katherine Anne Porter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	43
Chapter Three. Domestic Pandemic: Thomas Wolfe and William Maxwell Thomas Wolfe and William Maxwell Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	75
PART II. Pandemic Modernism
Chapter Four. On Seeing Illness: Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	103
Chapter Five. A Wasteland of Influenza: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	142
Chapter Six. Apocalyptic Pandemic: W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
PART III. Pandemic Cultures
Chapter Seven. Spiritualism, Zombies, and the Return of the Dead Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
Coda. THE STRUCTURE OF ILLNESS, THE SHAPE OF LOSS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	255
BIBLIOGRAPHY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	297
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	313

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Illustrations
- Other: 23 b&w photographs

eBook

Published: October 21, 2019
ISBN: 9780231546317