Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot

by Edited by Cassandra Laity , Nancy K. Gish

• ISBN13: 9780521806886
• ISBN10: 0521806887
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-11-29
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This collection of essays brings together scholars from a wide range of critical approaches to study T. S. Eliot's engagement with desire, homoeroticism and early twentieth-century feminism in his poetry, prose and drama. Ranging from historical and formalist literary criticism to psychological and psychoanalytic theory and cultural studies, Gender, Desire and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot illuminates such topics as the influence of Eliot's mother - a poet and social reformer - on his art; the aesthetic function of physical desire; the dynamic of homosexuality in his poetry and prose; and his identification with passive or 'feminine' desire in his poetry and drama. The book also charts his reception by female critics from the early twentieth century to the present. This book should be essential reading for students of Eliot and Modernism, as well as queer theory and gender studies.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Notes on contributors	x
Introduction: Eliot, gender, and modernity	1	(22)
Cassandra Laity
PART I HOMOEROTICISMS
1 The love song of T.S. Eliot: elegiac homoeroticism in the early poetry	23	(20)
Colleen Lamos
2 T.S. Eliot, famous clairvoyante	43	(23)
Tim Dean
3 "Cells in one body": nation and eros in the early work of T.S. Eliot	66	(17)
Michele Tepper
4 The masculinity behind the ghosts of modernism in Eliot's Four Quartets	83	(24)
Peter Middleton
PART II DESIRE
5 Discarnate desire: T.S. Eliot and the poetics of dissociation	107	(23)
Nancy K. Gish
6 Mimetic desire and the return to origins in The Waste Land	130	(20)
Jewel Spears Brooker
7 Theorizing emotions in Eliot's poetry and poetics	150	(25)
Charles Altieri
PART III MODERN WOMEN
8 Through schoolhouse windows: women, the academy, and T.S. Eliot	175	(20)
Gail McDonald
9 T.S. Eliot speaks the body: the privileging of female discourse in Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party	195	(20)
Richard Badenhausen
10 T.S. Eliot, women, and democracy	215	(19)
Rachel Potter
11 Vipers, viragos, and spiritual rebels: women in T.S. Eliot's Christian society plays	234	(20)
Elisabeth Diiumer
Index	254