T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History

by Edited by Ronald Bush

• ISBN13: 9780521105286
• ISBN10: 0521105285
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-03-19
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The centenary of Eliot's birth in 1988 provided the salutary occasion to go back to his life and work, to reassess him in the light of issues raised by various critical movements--the new historicism, feminism, reader-reception theory--that have come to the fore since the New Criticism poststructuralist. This sort of reassessment is the lively and pertinent idea behind Ronald Bush's collection of new essays on Eliot. The essays assembled vary in approach, but share a commitment to the discipline of history, and an awareness that history can function as critique as well as celebration. Many of the essays take issue with Eliot's self-presentation and include documents Eliot chose not to emphasize. Some press the limits of literary and intellectual history to enter areas of cultural practice, stressing the institutions of publishing and the social processes of gender formation. Other essays address issues such as the direction of twentieth-century writing, the impact of self-professed masculinist poetry on women readers, and whether modernism's social values were really consistently inimical to liberal visions of the future.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Eliot's Women/Women's Eliot

Eliot and women

Gender, voice and figuration in Eliot's early poetry

Ara Vos Prec: Eliot's negotiation of satire and suffering

The Waste Land and Eliot's poetry notebook

The price of Modernism: publishing The

Eliot and the Practice of Twentieth-Century Poetry

The allusive poet: Eliot and his sources

Forms of simultaneity in The

The History and Future of Modernism

Eliot, Lukacs and the politics of Modernism

T. S. Eliot and Modernism at the present time: a provocation

Index

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