Please join us for a discussion of Elizabeth Outka's latest book Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature, published by Columbia University Press.
A CONVERSATION WITH ELIZABETH OUTKA AND SARAH COLE
Thursday, July 9, 19:00
REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT
Please join us for a discussion of Elizabeth Outka's latest book Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature, published by Columbia University Press.
ABOUT THE BOOK
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.
PURCHASE A COPY OF THE BOOK HERE
EVENT SPEAKERS
Elizabeth Outka is Professor of English at the University of Richmond, where she teaches modernism and contemporary literature. She is the author of Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature (Columbia 2020) and Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic (Oxford 2009). Her essays have appeared in Modernism/modernity, NOVEL, Contemporary Literature, The Paris Review Daily and many edited collections.
Sarah Cole
Sarah Cole is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Dean of Humanities at Columbia University. A specialist in literary modernism, she is the co-founder of the NYNJ Modernism Seminar and director of the Humanities War and Peace Initiative at Columbia. She is the author of three books, Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century (Columbia, 2019), At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (Oxford, Modernist Literature and Culture series, 2012) and Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (Cambridge, 2003), and has published articles in journals such as PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Modernist Cultures, Modern Fiction Studies, and ELH, and in edited collections. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
This virtual event is organized in collaboration with Columbia University Press, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, the Columbia Maison Française, and the Alliance Program.
