Prizes for Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature (Book)

Transatlantic Studies Association-Cambridge University Press 2019 Book Prize [link]
Date: 7/7/2021 12:00:00 AM
Organization: Transatlantic Studies Association [link]
Abstract: By a coincidence of timing, this groundbreaking work of extraordinary intellectual breadth and depth resonates deeply with our current circumstances. In examining the impact of the 1918-1920 global influenza pandemic on selected British and American modernist literature, including the early realist engagement, Elizabeth Outka introduces a new reading of these seminal texts, one that in various ways was not attuned to the overt public consciousness of the time or later. This work therefore engages a deep rereading of the literature set within a new frame, addressing difficult and illuminating issues of the underlying and contested politics of both remembrance and forgetting. Outka engages and puts in context the simultaneous impact of the war and the pandemic, which shaped the historical mindset in various ways, deliberately or unconsciously preferencing and valuing one form of death over another. Engaging trauma and memory, her work fundamentally invites us to reconsider the influenza

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