Eliot Now

Bloomsbury Publishing

Cloth $115.00 (ISBN 978-1-3501-7392-7) 2024
Ebook $103.50 (ISBN 978-1-3501-7393-4) 2024

 

Over a dozen new volumes of T. S. Eliot’s poetry, prose, and letters have been published in the past decade. This collection presents unabashedly fresh approaches to Eliot, while simultaneously guiding readers through the new materials that are available for the first time outside of restricted archives. Eliot, the figurehead of literary modernism, continues to be someone whom critics love to hate (Misogynist! Reactionary! Anti-Semite!) and readers love to devour (Profound! Revolutionary! Resonant!). Why does one artist elicit such different responses?

Eliot Now collects new and established voices in Eliot studies, integrating contemporary critical approaches with careful attention to the newly published materials. Whether grappling with the controversial new two-volume Poems, narrating the experience of opening Eliot’s letters in the Emily Hale papers (until 2020 the “most famous sealed archive in the world”), or rereading his works through ecocritical or trans studies lenses, Eliot Now shows how this most effusively celebrated and heatedly criticized 20th-century writer continues to change the way we read literature in the 21st century. The collection concludes with six award-winning contemporary poets considering the influence of The Waste Land on poetry today.

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Table of Contents

I. New Eliot
1. Introduction (Megan Quigley & David E. Chinitz)
2. The New Poems of T. S. Eliot (Mark Ford)
3. The Complete Prose (Anthony Cuda)
4. Eliot’s Divided Life (Frances Dickey)
5. Eliot as Public Intellectual (Jeremy Noel-Tod)

II. Eliot in Theory
6. “No empty bottles”: Eliot’s Ambivalent Anthropocene (Julia Daniel)
7. Eliot and Translation Theory (Vera Kutzinski)
8. Whiteness and Religious Conversion in Four Quartets (Ann Marie Jakubowski)
9. Tiresias and TERFism Today: The Waste Land’s Modernist Feminine, Cis and Trans (Emma Heaney)
10. Eliot in the Dadabase (Elyse Graham & Michelle Taylor)
11. Of Corpses, Corpuses, and Career Capital: Eliot and Print Culture (Michael Whitworth)
12. The Always Inconvenient Dead: Lyric Theory and Eliot’s Early Verse (Paul Franz)
13. Eliot's Political Theology (C. D. Blanton)
14. The Perfect Post-Critic? (Sumita Chakraborty)

III. Looking Ahead
15. The Future of Tradition? Eliot and the Condition of the Humanities (Simon During)
16. Eliot, Brexit, and the Idea of Europe (Jason Harding)
17. Mature Fans Steal: Eliot’s Fictions (Megan Quigley)
18. Afterword: Strange God: Eliot, Now (Urmila Seshagiri)
19. The Waste Land Centenary: Poets on Eliot (James Longenbach, Carl Phillips, Lesley Wheeler, Craig Raine, Hannah Sullivan, Allison Rollins)