Instructive Pandemics? Meaning-Making and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 in Contemporary Historical Fiction for Young Adults

Abstract

This article investigates how contemporary young adult historical fiction about the 1918 influenza pandemic creates meaning from the contingent event. Analyzing Cat Winters’s In the Shadow of Blackbirds (2014), Makiia Lucier’s A Death-Struck Year (2016), and Mary Downing Hahn’s One for Sorrow (2018) reveals three frames of meaning-making. First, the collective frame uses quantifiable historical data and external sources. Second, the individual frame filters the pandemic through the protagonists’ coming-of-age journeys and gain of agency. Third, the supernatural frame employs ghosts and reframes objects tied to the pandemic (like flu masks) to the uncanny. The article concludes that these intersecting frames validate the complex uncertainty of the pandemic experience for adolescents.