Abstract

An American teacher of literature and poetry living in Montréal, Curtis Brown, recovers Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925) as a ‘virus novel’, venturing an integrated response to two literary questions occasioned by the recent pandemic: What might the contemporary ‘Covid novel’ look like? And how did the Spanish flu of 1918–1919—which infected a third of the world's population and killed 50 million—leave literary traces so few and faint? Brown tracks the genesis of An American Tragedy in Dreiser's personal life, his research in microbiology and his general interest in plagues to show how a form traditionally associated with the ‘individual moral adventure’ was repurposed for an institutional epic of viral contagion and systemic malaise. Charting the vicissitudes of Dreiser's reputation over a century, and presenting his formal innovations as widely assimilated, largely unrecognized, and more relevant than ever, Brown concludes that a writer's influence, like a virus, can disappear into ubiquity.