Description
Book SynopsisA Companion to T.S. Eliot introduces a new generation of readers and educators to Eliot and covers the full breadth of his literary career. Chapters explore the powerful forces that shaped Eliot as a writer and thinker, analyze his body of work, and assess his oeuvre in a variety of contexts: historical, cultural, social, and philosophical.
Table of ContentsNotes on Contributors viii
Preface xiv
Acknowledgments xvi
Abbreviations Used for Works by T. S. Eliot xvii
Part I: Influences 1
1 The Poet and the Pressure Chamber: Eliot’s Life 3
Anthony Cuda
2 Eliot’s Ghosts: Tradition and its Transformations 15
Sanford Schwartz
3 T. S. Eliot and the Symbolist City 27
Barry J. Faulk
4 Not One, Not Two: Eliot and Buddhism 40
Christina Hauck
5 Yes and No: Eliot and Western Philosophy 53
Jewel Spears Brooker
6 A Vast Wasteland? Eliot and Popular Culture 66
David E. Chinitz
7 Mind, Myth, and Culture: Eliot and Anthropology 79
Marc Manganaro
8 “Where are the eagles and the trumpets?”: Imperial Decline and Eliot’s Development 91
Vincent Sherry
Part II: Works 105
9 Searching for the Early Eliot: Inventions of the March Hare 107
Jayme Stayer
10 Prufrock and Other Observations: A Walking Tour 120
Frances Dickey
11 Disambivalent Quatrains 133
Jeffrey M. Perl
12 “Gerontion”: The Mind of Postwar Europe and the Mind(s) of Eliot 145
Edward Brunner
13 “Fishing, with the arid plain behind me”: Difficulty, Deferral, and Form in The Waste Land 157
Michael Coyle
14 The Enigma of “The Hollow Men” 168
Elisabeth Däumer
15 Sweeney Agonistes: A Sensational Snarl 179
Christine Buttram
16 “Having to construct”: Dissembly Lines in the “Ariel” Poems and Ash-Wednesday 191
Tony Sharpe
17 “The inexplicable mystery of sound”: Coriolan, Minor Poems, Occasional Verses 204
Gareth Reeves
18 Coming to Terms with Four Quartets 216
Lee Oser
19 “Away we go”: Poetry and Play in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats 228
Sarah Bay-Cheng
20 Eliot’s 1930s Plays: The Rock, Murder in the Cathedral, and The Family Reunion 239
Randy Malamud
21 Eliot’s “Divine” Comedies: The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman 251
Carol H. Smith
22 Taking Literature Seriously: Essays to 1927 263
Leonard Diepeveen
23 He Do the Critic in Different Voices: The Literary Essays after 1927 275
Richard Badenhausen
24 In Times of Emergency: Eliot’s Social Criticism 287
John Xiros Cooper
Part III: Contexts 299
25 Eliot’s Poetics: Classicism and Histrionics 301
Lawrence Rainey
26 T. S. Eliot and Something Called Modernism 311
Ann Ardis
27 Conflict and Concealment: Eliot’s Approach to Women and Gender 323
Cyrena Pondrom
28 Eliot and “Race”: Jews, Irish, and Blacks 335
Bryan Cheyette
29 “The pleasures of higher vices”: Sexuality in Eliot’s Work 350
Patrick Query
30 “An occupation for the saint”: Eliot as a Religious Thinker 363
Kevin J. H. Dettmar
31 Eliot’s Politics 376
Michael Levenson
32 Keeping Critical Thought Alive: Eliot’s Editorship of the Criterion 388
Jason Harding
33 Making Modernism: Eliot as Publisher 399
John Timberman Newcomb
34 Eliot and the New Critics 411
Gail McDonald
35 “T. S. Eliot rates socko!”: Modernism, Obituary, and Celebrity 423
Aaron Jaffe
36 Eliot’s Critical Reception: “The quintessence of twenty-first-century poetry” 436
Nancy K. Gish
37 Radical Innovation and Pervasive Influence: The Waste Land 449
James Longenbach
Bibliography of Works by T. S. Eliot 460
Index 463
