Abstract
Through a content and discourse analysis of Canada’s prominent English-language newspapers during the Spanish Influenza pandemic, this article explores how newspapers, as cultural texts, negotiated the pandemic. Specifically considering not only the ways in which issues of community and contagion were not singularly reported on, but also how the pandemic and those who fell victim to it were sensationalized through editorials. Where The Globe, founded in 1844 was, by 1900, required reading for the educated and business community in Toronto, the Daily Star, founded in 1900, was recognized by progressive businessmen as a labor newspaper, becoming a voice for the federal Liberal government. This article examines how each newspaper reported on the pandemic, and the overlapping social issues and business interests of the period (e.g., World War I, smallpox, eugenics, immigration, women’s rights, and blackface theater) that compounded the virus. How did newspapers negotiate the virus? What does the newspaper coverage reveal in terms of complex intersections between pandemics and media culture, representation and myth, cultural memory and forgetting?
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Notes
- 1.
According to etymologists at Merriam-Webster, “grippe” means “seizure” in French.
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This article was supported through a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant.
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Thompson, C., Wowk, L. (2022). Reading Toronto’s Response to Spanish Influenza: The Globe and Daily Star Report on the 1918–20 Pandemic’s Second Wave. In: Venkatesan, S., Chatterjee, A., Lewis, A.D., Callender, B. (eds) Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1296-2_7
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