Stephen Kern, author of The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918:
Viral Modernism is an elegantly written, penetrating study of how the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 shaped modernist literature and society, most notably in Clarissa’s illnesses in Mrs. Dalloway; the burning thirst and drowning in The Waste Land; and the influence of Yeats’s stricken, pregnant wife as he wrote “The Second Coming.”

Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative:
How and why, asks Elizabeth Outka, have we missed “the viral tragedy within iconic modernist texts”? And what do we learn when we listen for it? Viral Modernism resuscitates the buried stories of the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic in relation to modernist literary form. The voices that surface through the exquisite readings of this well-researched, well-argued study offer insight not only into the tragic experience of this devastating disease but also into how those affected use literary and cultural forms to make sense of that experience, hence into the nature of storytelling itself.

Sarah Cole, author of Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century:
Elizabeth Outka answers a question that has hardly been asked, let alone answered: where is the flu in modernism? It is one of those books whose importance is written into its DNA. Adjusting our eyes so that we can see the shadowy presence of the pandemic, Outka gives us a new vision of modernism, vulnerable and embodied. Steeped in a rich and riveting archive, Viral Modernism offers transformative insights into the motivation and meaning of modernist texts, attuning us to the troubling ways illness can disappear from our cultural memory.