Awards

• Short-listed for MSA Book Prize, Modernist Studies Association 2021
• Winner of SAMLA Studies Book Award - Monograph, South Atlantic Modern Language Association 2020
• Winner of Transatlantic Studies Association-CUP Book Award 2018-2019
• Winner of Transatlantic Studies Association-CUP Book Award 2021

Overview

Full Product Details

9780231185745

Table of Contents

Reviews

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. -- Celia Marshik, author of <i>At the Mercy of Their Clothes: Modernism, the Middlebrow, and British Garment Culture</i> 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. -- Stephen Kern, author of <i>The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918</i> 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. -- Priscilla Wald, author of <i>Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative</i> 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. -- Sarah Cole, author of <i>Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century</i> In her timely, revelatory book, Viral Modernism, Elizabeth Outka argues that the wide-ranging, frightening effects of the pandemic described in these vivid letters to Eliot's mother also shaped The Waste Land in ways that have been neglected. -- Mena Mitrano * Time Present *

Viral Modernism is an elegantly written, penetrating study of how the influenza pandemic of 1918 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. -- Stephen Kern, author of <i>The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918</i> 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. -- Sarah Cole, author of <i>Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century</i>

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. -- Sarah Cole, author of <i>Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century</i>

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.--Sarah Cole, author of Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century

Author 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).

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