1
40
1
-
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
URL Address
<a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajaa017" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajaa017</a>
Pages
507-534
Volume
32
Search for Full-text
Locate full-text within NEOMED Library's e-journal collections
<a href="http://neomed.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajaa017" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">NEOMED Full-text Holding (if available) - Proxy DOI:10.1093/alh/ajaa0177</a>
Rights
Article information provided for research and reference use only. All rights are retained by the journal listed under publisher and/or the creator(s).
Issue
3
ISSN
1468-4365
NEOMED College
NEOMED College of Medicine
NEOMED Department
Department of Family & Community Medicine
Update Year & Number
July 2020 List
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Influenza and Embodied Sociality in Early Twentieth-Century American Literature
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Bracken RC
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Bracken, RC
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
American Literary History
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020
Subject
The topic of the resource
Pandemic; 1918 Influenza Pandemic; Spanish Flu; Public Health; Katherine Anne Porter
Description
An account of the resource
This article reads two early twentieth-century American novels, William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows (1937) and Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), in relation to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–19 and the history of public health. Beyond serving as a literary record of “America’s forgotten pandemic,” it interprets these novels as experiments in what I term “embodied sociality”: a biocultural model of social life encompassing both the abstract, symbolic dimensions of community belonging and the concrete, biological contours of collective living made visible through the spread of infectious disease. I argue that Swallows and Pale Horse challenge the logic of “modern health citizenship,” which prioritized personal hygiene measures to prevent the spread of influenza through a community, that was promoted in turn-of-the-century public health efforts. Instead, these novels destabilize perceptions of the body as a discrete and potentially impermeable entity, revealing how to belong to a community is to be susceptible to the unseen agents of disease that move between bodies in close proximity, as well as to be, albeit unwittingly, a potential carrier of disease. Attending to embodied sociality as made visible by the flu, these novels necessitate a new way of writing pandemic—one that blends the narrative conventions of plague writing and autopathography. In so doing, I contend, Pale Horse and Swallows invite us to reimagine embodiment and community belonging by holding the local and global, personal and political, individual and collective dimensions of pandemic together.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajaa017
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
journalArticle
1918 Influenza Pandemic
Bracken RC
Department of Family & Community Medicine
Katherine Anne Porter
NEOMED College of Medicine
pandemic
Public Health
Spanish Flu