Viral modernism : the influenza pandemic and interwar literature / Elizabeth Outka.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 255-312) and index.

Acknowledgments -- Chapter One. Introducing the pandemic -- PART I. PANDEMIC REALISM: MAKING AN ATMOSPHERE VISIBLE. Chapter Two. Untangling war and plague: Willa Cather and Katherine Anne Porter -- Chapter Three. Domestic pandemic: Thomas Wolfe and William Maxwell -- PART II. PANDEMIC MODERNISM. Chapter Four. On seeing illness: Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway -- Chapter Five. A wasteland of influenza: T. S. Eliot's The Waste land -- Chapter Six. Apocalyptic pandemic: W. B. Yeats's "The Second coming" -- PART III. PANDEMIC CULTURES. Chapter Seven. Spiritualism, zombies, and the return of the dead - Coda: The structure of illness, the shape of loss - Notes - Bibliography - Index.

"The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 took the lives of between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, and the United States suffered more casualties than in all the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries combined. Yet despite these catastrophic death tolls, the pandemic faded from historical and cultural memory in the United States and throughout Europe, overshadowed by World War One and the turmoil of the interwar period. In Viral Modernism, Elizabeth Outka reveals the literary and cultural impact of one of the deadliest plagues in history, bringing to light how it shaped canonical works of fiction and poetry. Outka shows how and why the contours of modernism shift when we account for the pandemic's hidden but widespread presence. She investigates the miasmic manifestations of the pandemic and its spectral dead in interwar Anglo-American literature, uncovering the traces of an outbreak that brought a nonhuman, invisible horror into every community. Viral Modernism examines how literature and culture represented the virus's deathly fecundity, as writers wrestled with the scope of mass death in the domestic sphere amid fears of wider social collapse. Outka analyzes overt treatments of the pandemic by authors like Katherine Anne Porter and Thomas Wolfe and its subtle presence in works by Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats. She uncovers links to the disease in popular culture, from early zombie resurrection to the resurgence of spiritualism. Viral Modernism brings the pandemic to the center of the era, revealing a vast tragedy that has hidden in plain sight"-- Provided by publisher.

Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on April 08, 2021).

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