The War at Home: Writing Influenza in Alice Munro’s “Carried Away” and Kevin Kerr’s Unity (1918)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alice Munro’s short story “Carried Away” and Kevin Kerr’s play Unity (1918) are among the relatively few twentieth-century Canadian depictions of the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918, a devastating global pandemic that produced the same kind of public health measures and social upheaval as the recent coronavirus COVID-19. While Unity (1918) explores how caregiving responsibilities were thrust upon women because the nation’s medical resources were overwhelmed, “Carried Away” considers how the transmission of romantic passion can parallel both influenza’s contagion and the dissemination of subversive political ideas. Drawing on the work of literary scholars and medical historians, this essay aims to assess how Spanish flu has been used in Canadian fiction and drama. While it has been alleged that World War I’s “soldiers have been remembered while the sick have been forgotten” (Davis 61), Munro’s and Kerr’s portrayals suggest a more nuanced use of influenza history.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".