“An Extraordinary Sequel: The ‘Russian’ Influenza and Enduring Sequelae in Victorian Culture”
Posted in Scholarship | Tagged Lakshmi Krishnan, Scholarship 2022
Dr. Lakshmi Krishnan guest edited, with Kari Nixon, the Journal of Victorian Culture‘s Rountable on “Outbreak: Contagion and Culture in the Victorian Era”.
In this article, Dr. Lakshmi Krishnan examines the ‘Russian’ influenza pandemic’s enduring cultural and biosocial impact through the framework of sequelae – chronic conditions arising in the aftermath of acute illness. Drawing on medical case histories, criminal reports, illness narratives, and works of fiction, she analyzes how the Victorians taxonomized and theorized such long-term effects of infectious disease, exploring pandemics’ capacity not only to afflict individuals & publics, but to persist beyond the original outbreak in body-minds, and to operate on different scales of time, probing how the Victorians understood the very nature and temporality of contagion.