Viral Modernism reveals the literary and cultural impact of one of the deadliest plagues in history, the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, bringing to light how it shaped canonical works of fiction and poetry. Elizabeth Outka shows how and why the contours of modernism shift when we account for the pandemic's hidden but widespread presence.

Acknowledgments
1. Introducing the Pandemic
Part I. Pandemic Realism: Making an Atmosphere Visible
2. Untangling War and Plague: Willa Cather and Katherine Anne Porter
3. Domestic Pandemic: Thomas Wolfe and William Maxwell
Part II. Pandemic Modernism
4. On Seeing Illness: Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway
5. A Wasteland of Influenza: T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land
6. Apocalyptic Pandemic: W. B. Yeats's "The Second Coming"
Part III. Pandemic Cultures
7. Spiritualism, Zombies, and the Return of the Dead
Coda: The Structure of Illness, the Shape of Loss
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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).