T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History

by Edited by Ronald Bush

• ISBN13: 9780521390743
• ISBN10: 0521390745
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1991-02-22
• 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 and that can be loosely subsumed under the rubric ‘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 emphasise. 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

Acknowledgments

Introduction Ronald Bush

Part I. Eliot's Women/Women's Eliot: 1. Eliot and women Lyndall Gordon

2. Gender, voice and figuration in Eliot's early poetry Carol Christ

Part II. The Genesis and Transmission of the Waste Land and its Associated Poems: 3. Ars vos prec: Eliot's negotiation of satire and suffering James Longenbach

4. The waste land and Eliot's poetry potebook John T. Mayer

5. The price of modernism: publishing the waste land Laurence Rainey

Part III. Eliot and the Practice of Twentieth-Century Poetry: 6. The allusive poet: Eliot and his sources A. Walton Litz

7. Forms of simultaneity in the waste land and burnt norton Alan Williansom

Part IV. The History and Future of Modernism: 8. Eliot, Lukacs, and the politics of modernism Michael North

9. T. S. Eliot and modernism at the present time: a provovation Ronald Bush

Contributors

Index.