Peter Fifield: Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books

Professor Fifield’s Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books would seem a timely publication for 2020. The intense shifts caused by our current crisis have fomented an interest in scholarship addressing the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic. Scholars such as Elizabeth Outka have begun to redress the overwhelming emphasis on mental illness in modernist scholarship, and Fifield’s book advances this work by focusing on corporeal illness in both ‘high’ as well as ‘middle-brow’ literature. When approaching familiar critical ground in these works, his study pivots to lesser trod paths—for example, focusing on Clarissa Dalloway’s influenza rather than Septimus Smith’s suicide in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway or considering Dorothy Richardson’s exploration of the shifts in sympathy compelled by institutional structures...