Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf

by Gabrielle McIntire

• ISBN13: 9780521877855
• ISBN10: 0521877857
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-02-25
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf were almost exact contemporaries, readers and critics of each others' work, and friends for over twenty years. Their writings, though, have never been paired in a book-length study. Modernism, Memory, and Desire proposes that some striking correspondences exist in Eliot and Woolf's poetic, fictional, critical, and autobiographical texts, particularly in their recurring turn to the language of desire, sensuality, and the body to render memory's processes. The book includes extensive archival research on some mostly unknown bawdy poetry by T. S. Eliot while offering new readings of major work by both writers, including The Waste Land, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', Orlando, and To the Lighthouse. McIntire juxtaposes Eliot and Woolf with several major modernist thinkers of memory, including Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Walter Benjamin, to offer compelling reconsiderations of the relation between textuality, remembrance, and the body in modernist literature.

Table of Contents

Illustration	p. viii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
An unexpected beginning: sex, race, and history in T. S. Eliot's Columbo and Bolo poems	p. 10
Mixing memory and desire: rereading Eliot and the body of history	p. 39
Eliot, eros, and desire: "Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'"	p. 75
T. S. Eliot: writing time and blasting memory	p. 101
Virginia Woolf, (auto)biography, and the eros of memory: reading Orlando	p. 119
Other kinds of autobiographies: sketching the past, forgetting Freud, and reaching the lighthouse	p. 147
Remembering what has "almost already been forgotten": where memory touches history	p. 180
Epilogue	p. 209
Notes	p. 214
Index	p. 248
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