CONTENTS

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S ix

Chapter One
Introducing the Pandemic 1

PART I . Pandemic Realism: Making an Atmosphere Visible 39

Chapter Two
Untangling War and Plague: Willa Cather and
Katherine Anne Porter 43

Chapter Three
Domestic Pandemic: Thomas Wolfe and William Maxwell 75

PART II . Pandemic Modernism 99

Chapter Four
On Seeing Illness: Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway 103

Chapter Five
A Wasteland of Influenza: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land 142
 viii
CONTENTS

Chapter Six
Apocalyptic Pandemic: W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” 167

PART III . Pandemic Cultures 197

Chapter Seven
Spiritualism, Zombies, and the Return of the Dead 199

Coda
The Structure of Illness, the Shape of Loss 243

NOTES 255

B I B L IO G R A P H Y 297

INDEX 313