Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature by Elizabeth Outka (review)

• Published in: Modern fiction studies 2021-10, Vol.67 (3), p.593-595
• Main Author: Gerald, James Fitz
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aesthetics; Authorship; Cather, Willa (1873-1947); COVID-19; Death & dying; Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns) (1888-1965); Influenza; Literary characters; Literary devices; Literary studies; Literature; Metaphor; Modernism; Readers; Reading acquisition; Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941); World War I; Writers
• ISSN: 0026-7724; 1080-658X; 1080-658X
• DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2021.0020

Not only does this paradigm help the book challenge long-held assumptions about seemingly familiar texts, forcing readers to rethink the metaphors of modernism beyond the trenches of the First World War, but it also theorizes a new way of understanding the literary-cultural significance of mass illness, suffering, and death, elaborating the methods and mechanisms through which iconic texts have articulated “the rippling and hard-to-capture effects that an invading virus produces within the physical body and in the body politic.” The book makes ambitious claims about the explanatory power of literature in the context of disease emergence, drawing heavily on and challenging the pandemic’s relative absence within the medical and health humanities, trauma studies, and modernist literary studies. Viral Modernism might have been published just before the spread of COVID-19, but the viral atmosphere that Outka so skillfully examines captures, too, the present state of a world arrested by contagion. [...]the book not only challenges what we talk about when we talk about modernism but also, perhaps most importantly, clues readers into how literary culture makes legible the logics and legacies of global catastrophic events, reminding us that even an outbreak on the scale of COVID-19 “can be hidden,” as Outka warns, “unless we learn to read for its presence” (254).