MARC Record from Library of Congress

LEADER: 02658nam a22003498i 4500
001 2011051407
003 DLC
005 20120110102224.0
008 111213s2012 nyu 000 0 eng
010 $a 2011051407
020 $a9780312234492 (hardback)
040 $aDLC$beng$cDLC$erda
042 $apcc
050 00 $aPN56.D56$bF57 2012
082 00 $a809/.933561$223
084 $aLIT000000$2bisacsh
100 1 $aFisher, Jane Elizabeth,$d1959-
245 10 $aEnvisioning disease, gender, and war :$bwomen's narratives of the 1918 influenza pandemic /$cBy Jane Elizabeth Fisher.
260 $aNew York :$bPalgrave Macmillan,$c2012.
263 $a1207
300 $apages cm
336 $atext$2rdacontent
337 $aunmediated$2rdamedia
338 $avolume$2rdacarrier
520 $a"Katherine Anne Porter survived a severe case of influenza in 1918, but later observed, "[I]t simply divided my life, cut across it." The 1918 influenza pandemic spanned the end of World War I and the granting of female suffrage in the Western world, forcing changes in gender roles and subjectivity itself during the volatile early twentieth century. Focusing on major novels and essays by Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Virginia Woolf, this work examines how narratives by women writers engage the 1918 influenza pandemic, emphasizing vision as compensation for the apocalyptic losses of both war and disease. While male characters-- at double jeopardy due to combat and pandemic-- inevitably die, female characters develop an appreciation of their own endurance, envisioning and accepting transformed futures. Drawing on World War I posters, poetry, songs, drawings, and photographs, Fisher's argument offers a persuasive framework connecting war, disease, and gender innovation to the shock of the modern in early twentieth-century culture. The book's last chapter extends her argument to late twentieth-century women authors such as the Canadian fiction writer Alice Munro, the American poet Ellen Bryant Voigt, and the Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta, whose works also evoke the 1918 influenza pandemic. Contemporary representations of the pandemic, however, do not grant it innovative power, regressively connecting it instead to conventional marriage and limited vision"--$cProvided by publisher.
650 0 $aDiseases and literature.
650 0 $aLiterature$xWomen authors$xHistory and criticism.
650 0 $aEpidemics in literature.
650 0 $aGender identity in literature.
650 0 $aInfluenza Epidemic, 1918-1919.
650 0 $aLiterature$y20th century$xHistory and criticism.
650 7 $aLITERARY CRITICISM / General.$2bisacsh