Reading for Pandemic: Viral Modernism by Elizabeth Outka, New York: Columbia University Press, 2020 (original) (raw)

COVID-19, like previous outbreaks of infectious disease at the turn of the twenty-first century, has reawakened interest in the 1918-1919 Spanish influenza pandemic. As we wrestle with the unknowns and strive to contain the spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic operates as a poignant benchmark; how do morbidity, mortality, and case fatality rates of COVID-19 and Spanish flu compare? What can the public health response to the flu-or lack thereof-teach us about social distancing measures in the present? Does the Spanish flu's seasonal waves foretell similar, cyclical resurgences of COVID-19? When will it be safe to lift social distancing measures without seeing a resurgence like that observed in flu cases in 1918-1919? With pandemic, past and present, on everyone's minds, it seems Elizabeth Outka's Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature, published by Columbia University Press earlier this year, couldn't have been released at a more morbidly opportune moment. Irrespective of its timeliness, however, Viral Modernism offers significant contributions to the literary-historical study of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, as well as to the study of transatlantic modernist literature. Original readings of canonical modernist texts, including Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway and Katherine Anne Porter's oft-cited Pale Horse, Pale Rider-essentially the urtext of 1918-1919 influenza pandemicexcavate the lasting aesthetic impacts of the Spanish flu, which left at least fifty million dead worldwide and proved unprecedentedly lethal for otherwise healthy young adults (Tautenberger and Morens 2006). Since Alfred W. Crosby republished the second edition of his 1976 monograph Epidemic and Peace as America's Forgotten Pandemic in 1989, scholars have pondered Spanish flu's marked absence in early twentieth-century literature, even-especially-in the oeuvres of authors who had intimate, first-hand experience of the pandemic, such as