Envisioning disease, gender, and war : women's narratives of the 1918 influenza pandemic / Jane Elizabeth Fisher.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fisher, Jane Elizabeth, 1959-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Diseases and literature.

Literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

Literature.

Epidemics in literature.

Gender identity in literature.

Influenza Epidemic, 1918-1919.

Literature, Modern--20th century--History and criticism.

Literature, Modern.

Literature--Women authors.

Physical Description:

xii, 262 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Summary:

"Katherine Anne Porter survived a severe case of influenza in 1918, but later observed, "[I]t simply divided my life, cut across it." The 1918 influenza pandemic spanned the end of World War I and the granting of female suffrage in the Western world, forcing changes in gender roles and subjectivity itself during the volatile early twentieth century. Focusing on major novels and essays by Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Virginia Woolf, this work examines how narratives by women writers engage the 1918 influenza pandemic, emphasizing vision as compensation for the apocalyptic losses of both war and disease. While male characters-- at double jeopardy due to combat and pandemic-- inevitably die, female characters develop an appreciation of their own endurance, envisioning and accepting transformed futures. Drawing on World War I posters, poetry, songs, drawings, and photographs, Fisher's argument offers a persuasive framework connecting war, disease, and gender innovation to the shock of the modern in early twentieth-century culture. The book's last chapter extends her argument to late twentieth-century women authors such as the Canadian fiction writer Alice Munro, the American poet Ellen Bryant Voigt, and the Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta, whose works also evoke the 1918 influenza pandemic. Contemporary representations of the pandemic, however, do not grant it innovative power, regressively connecting it instead to conventional marriage and limited vision"--Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Chapter 1 The Fldneuse: Seeing and Remembering the Shock of Modernity 27

Chapter 2 Gender and Modernity: The Things Not Named in One of Ours 39

Chapter 3 "Novels Devoted to Influenza": Regarding War and Illness in Mrs. Dalloway 73

Chapter 4 Vision, Plague, and Apocalypse in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" 105

Chapter 5 Munro's "Carried Away" and Voigt's Kyrie: Ghostly Hauntings, Sublime Eclipses 149

Chapter 6 The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in the Developing World: Elechi Amadi and Buchi Emecheta's Occluded Vision 177.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780312234492

031223449X

OCLC:

772525881