The literary critic Paul Fussell wrote about this in The Great War and Modern Memory and elsewhere. TL;dr: a virus, being non-human and not even a visible part of nature, is hard to narrate or personify, so difficult to tell stories about.
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Totally true
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Going back way further than 1918, Thucydides is worth reading now, b/c in a sense the golden age of Pericles had a shadow which set the stage for the ensuing, random plague's special devastation--a hubris. A sense in Athenian society that it had solved or could solve everything.
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It's really interesting to think about why this is, actually. You're right about HIV--even in S Africa, where I live & where it has huge impact, it didn't make it into tons of lit. It's easy to say "decline of religion!" but I bet there are deeper answers
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And after about 20 million had died in WW I, the death toll from the flu seemed less shocking (and young soldiers were particularly vulnerable to the disease). Also, industrial deaths were common then (1K in one year in Pittsburgh's county alone). We expect to be safer now.
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Katherine Anne Porter’s short story Pale Horse Pale Rider Done Take My Lover Away. A masterpiece https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.184599/page/n1/mode/2up …
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