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! ...

Langston Hughes survived as a writer for over forty years under conditions that made survival virtually heroic. Determined on a literary career at a time when no African American had yet been able to live off his or her writing, Hughes not only faced poverty and racism but found himself pressed by the conflicting hopes, expectations, and demands of readers and critics. He relied on his skill as a mediator among competing positions in order to preserve his art, his integrity, and his unique...

Lively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at ‘The Beginning’ and concluding with ‘The End’, chapters range from the familiar, such as ‘Character’, ‘Narrative’ and ‘The Author’, to the more unusual, such as ‘Secrets’, ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Ghosts’. Now in its sixth edition, Bennett and Royle’s classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works...

As defining as Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education were to the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, respectively, Marjorie Garber’s The Use and Abuse of Literature is to our times.Even as the decline of the reading of literature, as argued by the National Endowment for the Arts, proceeds in our culture, Garber (“One of the most powerful women in the academic w...

This Companion has long been a standard introduction to the field. This second edition is updated and enhanced with four new chapters, addressing the key themes being researched, taught and studied in modernism. Its interdisciplinary approach is central to its success as it brings together readings of the many varieties of modernism. Chapters address the major literary genres, the intellectual, religious and political contexts, and parallel developments in film, painting and music. The cat...

Beginning its life as the sensational entertainment of the eighteenth century, the novel has become the major literary genre of modern times. Drawing on hundreds of examples of famous novels from all over the world, Marina MacKay explores the essential aspects of the novel and its history: where novels came from and why we read them; how we think about their styles and techniques, their people, plots, places, and politics. Between the main chapters are longer readings of individual works, ...

The historical novel is an enduringly popular genre that raises crucial questions about key literary concepts, fact and fiction, identity, history, reading, and writing. In this comprehensive, focused guide, Jerome de Groot offers an accessible introduction to the genre and critical debates that surround it, including:the development of the historical novel from early eighteenth-century works through to postmodern and contemporary historical fictiondiffere...

Terry Eagleton looks back across sixty years to an extraordinary critical milieu that transformed the study of literatureBefore the First World War, traditional literary scholarship was isolated from society at large. In the years following, a younger generation of critics came to the fore. Their work represented a reaction to the impoverishment of language in a commercial, utilitarian society increasingly under the sway of film, advertising, and the popular press....

Born in what was then still considered the American West, educated in the Ivy Halls of the Northeast, and repatriated as an English subject in 1927, Thomas Stearns Eliot today stands as one of the most important figures in the whole history of English literature. His signature works include poetry (The Waste Land, Four Quartets, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”), drama (Murder in the Cathedral, The Cocktail Party) and criticism (The Sacred Wood). Eliot received the Nobel Prize in 1948...

Modernist poems are some of the twentieth-century's major cultural achievements, but they are also hard work to read. This wide-ranging introduction takes readers through modernism's most famous poems and some of its forgotten highlights to show why modernists thought difficulty and disorientation essential for poetry in the modern world. In-depth chapters on Pound, Eliot, Yeats and the American modernists outline how formal experiments take on the new world of mass media, democracies, tot...

"Witty, shrewd, and imaginative essays on interdisciplinary topics . . . from Shakespeare to psychoanalysis, and the practice of higher education today." — Publishers WeeklyAs a break from their ordained labors, what might the Muses do on their lunch hour today? This collection of essays uses these figures of ancient legend to explore such modern-day topics as the curious return of myth and ritual in the theories of evolutionary psychologists and much more...

T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is often considered to be the most important poem written in English in the twentieth century. The poem dramatically shattered old patterns of form and style, proposed a new paradigm for poetry and poetic thought, demanded recognition from all literary quarters, and changed the ways in which it was possible to approach, read, or write poetry. The Waste Land helped to define the literary and artistic period known as modernism. This Companion is the first to be d...