Editors' Note

Exactly one year ago today as we write these words, Columbia University Press released a study in its modernist latitudes series by University of Richmond professor Elizabeth Outka. Although featuring several highly complimentary blurbs from well-regarded historians and literary critics—Stephen Kern and Priscilla Wald most notably—the volume initially suffered the same fate that most academic books do. Because the hardback edition came with a steep $105 list price, most brick-and-mortar retail outlets declined to stock it. Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post reviewed it. The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books also passed it over in favor of analyses that appealed to general audiences outside of the so-called Ivory Tower. Journals in literary studies lined up experts for a 750–1000-word assessment, but academic publishing is known for its tortoise pace of production, and the earliest a discussion might appear in print would be six to nine months if not a full year in the future. The steep $35 price tag for both the simultaneously released paperback and e-book versions likewise made sales beyond libraries unlikely, although Amazon.com was kind enough to discount the Kindle to $19.24 (a savings of 45 percent, as the website helpfully informs customers). Outka wrote an offshoot article for The Conversation ("Zombie flu"), an online publication known for its tagline "Academic rigor, journalistic flair," that was reprinted in a handful of major papers such as the Philadelphia Inquirer, thanks mainly to her subject matter's relevance to the impending Halloween season ("Your Halloween Zombie Costume"). But while the study would no doubt spark debate at literary conferences and in published scholarship, its main ideas would require time to digest, meaning the dialogue would take place some distance down the road.

By late March 2020, however, Outka was among the most visible humanities scholars in the mainstream media—perhaps second only to Princeton University's chair of African American studies, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., a regular talking head on MSNBC's Morning Joe news program whose incisive study of race relations, Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, broke onto the New York Times best-seller list a few months later in July. The reason for Outka's sudden prominence is obvious from the title of her book: Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. The sudden, bewildering devastation that Covid-19 visited upon "normal" life on or around 13 March, shutting down economies, quarantining families, sending unemployment rates around the world soaring to Great Depression levels, and costing to date some two million lives worldwide, did not just set commentators scrambling for historical precedent. It sent them searching for literary responses to the so-called "Spanish flu" disaster of 1918–1920, which claimed more lives than the Great War itself and, as Outka argues, forged two generations of modernists as deeply as the Western front. It was as if history alone were insufficient to understand the anxiety and dread with which Covid-19 suddenly blanketed the globe. The facts outlined in an illuminating historical account such as John M. Barry's The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in American History (2005; most recently updated in 2018), whose sales likewise skyrocketed in March, might explain how influenza spread from continent to continent a century ago. Yet it would not necessarily explain how people coped, nor how the plague affected the Western mindset and culture. Nor could it explain why, after the pandemic finally died off in the same month that F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre married, the catastrophe became a mere footnote in accounts of both the Great War and the emergent Jazz Age. For that understanding, we needed art.

Not surprisingly, Viral Modernism focuses on a bevy of canonical modernists, both British and American. Major sections focus on Willa Cather's One of Ours (1922)—a novel often unfairly maligned because of its distorted reputation as condoning the Great War—Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel (1929), William Maxwell's They Came Like Swallows (1937), and Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale...