Criticism of Eliot has ignored the public dimension of his life and work. His poetry is often seen as the private record of an internal spiritual struggle. Professor Cooper shows how Eliot deliberately addressed a North Atlantic 'mandarinate' fearful of social disintegration during the politically turbulent 1930s. Almost immediately following publication, Four Quartets was accorded canonical status as a work that promised a personal harmony divorced from the painful disharmonies of the emerging postwar world. Cooper connects Eliot's careers as banker, director and editor to a much wider cultural agenda. He aimed to reinforce established social structures during a period of painful political transition. This powerful and original study re-establishes the public context in which Eliot's work was received and understood. It will become an essential reference work for all interested in a wider understanding of Eliot and of Anglo-American cultural relations.

The last major verse written by Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot, considered by Eliot himself to be his finest work Four Quartets is a rich composition that expands the spiritual vision introduced in “The Waste Land.” Here, in four linked poems (“Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding”), spiritual, philosophical, and personal themes emerge through symbolic allusions and literary and religious references from both Eastern and Western thought. It is the culminating achievement by a man considered the greatest poet of the twentieth century and one of the seminal figures in the evolution of modernism.

Setting out to demonstrate the effect of politics on the work of T. S. Eliot, T. S. Eliot and Ideology charts first of all the influence of French reactionary thinking on Eliot's prose and poetry, and further argues that this political inheritance provided the intellectual framework he employed throughout his career. Asher's concentration on the specifically ideological separates this book from previous works on Eliot, and sheds light on Eliot's celebrated mid-career conversion to Catholicism. What results is a re-estimation of Eliot's view of literary history and literary theory, and new appraisals of several major poems and plays. Finally, the book discusses at length how Eliot's ideology profoundly influenced the study of literature in the English-speaking world for several decades.

Drawing on the latest scholarship and criticism, this volume provides an authoritative, accessible introduction to T. S. Eliot's complete oeuvre. It extends the focus of the original 1994 Companion, addressing issues such as gender and sexuality and challenging received accounts of his at times controversial critical reception.

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.

When the Eternal Can Be Met excavates the philosophy behind the theology of the twentieth century's most prominent Christian writers: C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden. These three literary giants converted to Christianity within little more than a decade of one another, and interestingly, all three theological authors turned to the theme of time. All three authors also came to remarkably similar conclusions about time, positing that the temporal present moment allowed one to meet the eternal. Decades before Lewis, Eliot, and Auden sought to creatively construct a fictive or poetic theology of time, the prominent philosopher Henri Bergson wrote about time's power to transform an individual's emotional and spiritual state, a theory well known by Lewis, Eliot, and Auden. When the Eternal Can Be Met argues that one cannot fully understand Lewis, Eliot, and Auden's theology of time without understanding Bergson's theories. From the secular philosophy of Bergson dawned the most important works of literary theology and treatments of time of the twentieth century, and in the Bergson-influenced literary constructs of Lewis, Eliot, and Auden, a common theological articulation sounds out--time present is where humans meet God.

A new view of the way modernist fiction writers tried to solve the problem of time. Do our fictions transform time? Do they cultivate the temporal environment? Such was the hope—or the fantasy—at work in many modernist novels for which time was not only the major subject but also an object of reparative aspiration. Aimed at a kind of stewardship of time, these fictions constitute a practice of modernist time ecology: an effort to restore those landscapes of time that have been thrown into crisis by modernity. In Modernist Time Ecology, Jesse Matz redefines temporal experimentation in central writers like Proust, Mann, Woolf, Ellison, and Cather, who developed literary forms to cultivate, restore, and enrich the temporal environment. He brings fresh attention to others who best exemplify this ecological motive, arguing that E. M. Forster, J. B. Priestley, and V. S. Naipaul are leading figures in this practice of temporal redress. Matz also reveals how contemporary film, social media movements, and public service efforts show what has become of the modernist interest in temporal stewardship. Matz combines an array of disciplines—including narrative theory, sociology, phenomenology, cognitive psychology, film studies, queer theory, and environmental studies—to theorize and explain the rationale and the limits to the idea that time might be subject to textual cultivation. Modernist Time Ecology is a deeply interdisciplinary book that changes what we think literature and the arts can do for the world at large.

Reflecting the surge of critical interest in Eliot renewed in recent years, A Companion to T.S. Eliot introduces the 'new' Eliot to readers and educators by examining the full body of his works and career. Leading scholars in the field provide a fresh and fully comprehensive collection of contextual and critical essays on his life and achievement. It compiles the most comprehensive and up-to-date treatment available of Eliot's work and career It explores the powerful forces that shaped Eliot as a writer and thinker, analyzing his body of work and assessing his oeuvre in a variety of contexts: historical, cultural, social, and philosophical It charts the surge in critical interest in T.S. Eliot since the early 1990s It provides an illuminating insight into a poet, writer, and critic who continues to define the literary landscape of the last century

Scrutinizing the aesthetic and ideological in the works by Lawrence, Woolf, and Eliot, this book gives a different perspective on Modernism and what are considered to be its principal features. In that respect, fragmentation, disunity, relativity of things, break with tradition, as well as the depiction of life’s disorder, are disputed and seen as aesthetic means for the promotion of certain ideologies. Aesthetics and Ideology of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot offers a smooth transition from general discussion and revision of some fixed concepts related to Modernism, through individual authors and their major works to the conclusion where the main findings are summarized and further explicated. Apart from dealing with Modernism in general, Aesthetics and Ideology of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot presents a somewhat different view on the authors it deals with. They are not only seen as opponents of established religious, political, and social views, but to a certain extent as their perpetrators. This duality concerning their stances is reconciled by their insisting on the aesthetic unity.

First Published in 2000. Nearly everyone who addresses T. S. Eliot's imaginative and critical work must acknowledge the importance of music in thematic and formal terms. This collection of original essays thoroughly explores this aspect of his work from a number of perspectives.