| Library status: currently open during regularly scheduled hours. |
| Library status: currently open during regularly scheduled hours. |
Becoming T. S. Eliot: The Rhetoric of Voice and Audience in Inventions of the March Hare by
How did an ordinary, if intelligent, boy who wrote unremarkable poems become--with no help, and in record time--the author of one of the most significant and beloved poems of the twentieth century? T. S. Eliot's juvenilia show little inclination to question the social, cultural, religious, or domestic values he had inherited. How did a young man who wrote uninspired doggerel about wilting flowers transform himself--in a mere twenty months--into the author of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"? In Becoming T. S. Eliot, Jayme Stayer--praised by Christopher Ricks as a scholar who is "scrupulous in acknowledging the contingencies that will always preclude perfection"--explains this staggering accomplishment by tracing Eliot's artistic and intellectual development. Relying on archival research and original analysis, this is the first book dedicated entirely to Inventions of the March Hare, Eliot's youthful notebook, which was once thought lost but was rediscovered after Eliot's death. Stayer places Eliot's verses in the chronological order of their composition, teasing out the narratives of their making. Focusing on the period from 1909 to 1915, this incisive portrait of Eliot as a budding writer is as much a study of Eliot himself as it is a study of how a writer hones his voice.
The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys by
Since her death in 1979, Jean Rhys's reputation as an important modernist author has grown. Her finely crafted prose fiction lends itself to multiple interpretations from radically different critical perspectives; formalism, feminism, and postcolonial studies among them. This Introduction offers a reliable and stimulating account of her life, work, contexts and critical reception. Her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, is analyzed together with her other novels, including Quartet and After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, and her short stories. Through close readings of the works, Elaine Savory reveals their common themes and connects these to different critical approaches. The book maps Rhys's fictional use of the actual geography of Paris, London and the Caribbean, showing how key understanding her relationships with the metropolitan and colonial spheres is to reading her texts. In this invaluable introduction for students, Savory explains the significance of Rhys as a writer both in her lifetime and today.
Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950 by 
The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts by 
Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century by
Eliot and His Age remains the best introduction to T. S. Eliot's life, ideas, and literary works. It is the essential starting place for anyone who would understand what Eliot was about. Russell Kirk's view of his older friend is sympathetic but not adulatory. His insights into Eliot's writings are informed by wide reading in the same authors who most influenced the poet, as well as by similar experiences and convictions. Kirk elaborates here a significant theory of literary meaning in general, showing how great literary works awaken our intuitive reason, giving us profound visions of truth that transcend logical processes. And he traces Eliot's political and cultural ideas to their true sources, showing the balance and subtlety of Eliot's views. Eliot and His Age is a literary biography that will endure when much of the more recent writing on Eliot is gathering dust.
Exploring Cultural Identities in Jean Rhys' Fiction by
Using a theoretical approach and a critical summary, combining the perspectives in the postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis and narratology with the tools of hermeneutics and deconstruction, this book argues that Jean Rhys's work can be subsumed under a poetics of cultural identity and hybridity. It also demonstrates the validity of the concept of hybridization as the expression of identity formation; the cultural boundaries variability; the opposition self-otherness, authenticity-fiction, trans-textuality; and the relevance of an integrated approach to multiple cultural identities as an encountering and negotiation space between writer, reader and work. The complexity of ontological and epistemological representation involves an interdisciplinary approach that blends a literary interpretive approach to social, anthropological, cultural and historical perspectives. The book concludes that in the author's fictional universe, cultural identity is represented as a general human experience that transcends the specific conditionalities of geographical contexts, history and culture. The construction of identity by Jean Rhys is represented by the dichotomy of marginal identity and the identification with a human ideal designed either by the hegemonic discourse or metropolitan culture or by the dominant ideology. The identification with a pattern of cultural authenticity, of racial, ethnic, or national purism is presented as a purely destructive cultural projection, leading to the creation of a static universe in opposition to the diversity of human feelings and aspirations. Jean Rhys's fictional discourse lies between "the anxiety of authorship" and "the anxiety of influence" and shows the postcolonial era of uprooting and migration in which the national ownership diluted the image of a "home" ambiguous located at the boundary between a myth of origins and a myth of becoming. The relationship between the individual and socio-cultural space is thus shaped in a dual hybrid position.
Ferocious Things: Jean Rhys and the Politics of Women's Melancholia by
It's fatal making a fuss ... . -Jean Rhys, Quartet. Cathleen Maslen's Ferocious Things: Jean Rhys and the Politics of Women's Melancholia closely engages with the most obvious theme of Rhys's writing: the speaking and inscription of feminine anguish. Maslen resists easy generalisations with respect to Rhys's portrayal of women's psychic pain, attending carefully to the nuances of sexual, cultural and ethnic displacement which inform the suffering of Rhys's protagonists. Acknowledging the many fine recent critical engagements with Rhys's unique corpus of novels, Maslen insists that Rhys's particular articulation of women's pain presents a significant literary transgression, defying the intractable cultural interdiction against women 'making a fuss.' At the same time, this book engages with the problematic privileging of melancholic and nostalgic discourse in the Western canon in general. Rhys's work, Maslen argues, simultaneously celebrates and resists fundamentally Eurocentric and anti-feminist paradigms of melancholia and nostalgia. In short, the ferocious melancholia of Jean Rhys's female voices poses constructive paradoxes and points of departure for feminist and post-colonial debates in the 21st century.
Impossible Modernism: T.S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, and the Critique of Historical Reason by 
Jean Rhys by
Jean Rhys has long been central to debates in feminist, modernist, Caribbean, British and postcolonial writing. Elaine Savory's study, first published in 1999, incorporates and modifies previous critical approaches and is a critical reading of Rhys's entire oeuvre, including the stories and autobiography, and is informed by Rhys's own manuscripts. Designed both for the serious scholar on Rhys and those unfamiliar with her writing, Savory's book insists on the importance of a Caribbean-centred approach to Rhys, and shows how this context profoundly affects her literary style. Informed by contemporary arguments on race, gender, class and nationality, Savory explores Rhys's stylistic innovations - her use of colours, her exploitation of the trope of performance, her experiments with creative non-fiction and her incorporation of the metaphysical into her texts. This study offers a comprehensive account of the life and work of this most complex and enigmatic of writers.
Jean Rhys by
Neglected and forgotten for many years, the arresting, elliptical novels written by Dominican-born Jean Rhys are now widely acclaimed. Her last and most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, her retelling of Jane Eyre, is a central text for the imaginative re-examination of gender and colonial power relations. Helen Carr's account draws on both recent feminism and postcolonial theory, and places Rhys's work in relation to modernist and postmodernist writing. First published in 1996, Helen Carr's revised edition takes full cognizance of the wide critical attention paid to Rhys since that date.
Jean Rhys: Twenty-first-century Approaches by
The 10 newly commissioned essays and introduction collected in this volume demonstrate Jean Rhys's centrality to modernism and to postcolonial literature alike by addressing her stories and novels from the 1920s and 1930s.
The Modern Dilemma: Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and Humanism by
Where Eliot's poetry is dominated by cultural, religious, and philosophical anxiety, Stevens' is bright, witty, and playful - and commonly dismissed as superficial. Surette demonstrates the seriousness of Stevens' life-long engagement with the modern dilemma of disbelief, showing that he, like Eliot, rejected the Humanist resolution. Surette proceeds by juxtaposing the two poets' responses in poetry and prose to the same texts and events: Marianne Moore's poetry, the Great War, Humanists and anti-Humanists, the Franco-Mexican Humanist Ramon Fernandez, Pure Poetry, and, finally, the gathering war clouds of the late 1930s.
Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf by
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, are rarely paired. 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 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.
Narrating from the Margins: Self-representation of Female and Colonial Subjectivities in Jean Rhys's Novels by
In Narrating from the Margins, Nagihan Haliloğlu casts a discerning look at Jean Rhys's protagonists and the ways in which they engage in self-narration. The book offers a close reading of Rhys's novels, with particular attention to the links between identity construction and self-narration, in a modernist and postcolonial idiom. It draws attention to particular subject-categories that Rhys's protagonists fall into, such as the amateur and the white Creole, and delineates narrating personas such as the mad witch and the zombie, to explore aspects of de-essentalization, narrative agency, and dysnarrativia. The way in which Rhys's protagonists engage in self-narration reveals the close link between race and gender, and how both are contained by similar metaphors, or how, indeed, they become metaphors for each other. The narrators are defined in relation to their place in the 'holy English family' and how they transgress the rules of that family to become 'exiles'. The study explores the ways in which the self-narrator responds when her narrative is obstructed by society; such as creating a community of stories in which her own makes sense, and/or resorting to third-person narration.
The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narratives by
According to Molly Hite, a number of influential contemporary women novelists--notably Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, Alice Walker, and Margaret Atwood--attempt innovations in narrative form that are more radical in their implications than the dominant modes of fictional experimentation characterized as postmodernist. In The Other Side of the Story, Hite makes the point that these innovations, which distinguish the genre she calls contemporary feminist narrative, are more radical precisely because their context is the critique of a culture and a literary tradition apprehended as profoundly masculinist.
Religion and Myth in T.S. Eliot's Poetry by 
Selected Poems by
Chosen by Eliot himself, the poems in this volume represent the poet' s most important work before Four Quartets. Included here is some of the most celebrated verse in modern literature-" The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, " " Gerontion, " " The Waste Land, " " The Hollow Men, " and " Ash Wednesday" -as well as many other fine selections from Eliot' s early work.
T. S. Eliot by
The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the twentieth century's most famous poet and its most influential literary arbiter, T.S. Eliot has long been thought to be an obscure and difficult poet--forbiddingly learned, maddeningly enigmatic.Now, in this brilliant exploration of T.S. Eliot's work, prize-winning poet Craig Raine reveals that, on the contrary, Eliot's poetry (and drama and criticism) can be seen as a unified and coherent body of work. Indeed, despite its manifest originality, its radical experimentation, and its dazzling formal variety, his verse yields meaning just as surely as other more conventional poetry. Raine argues that an implicit controlling theme--the buried life, or the failure of feeling--unfolds in surprisingly varied ways throughout Eliot's work. But alongside Eliot's desire "to live with all intensity" was also a distrust of "violent emotion for its own sake." Raine illuminates this paradoxical Eliot--an exacting anti-romantic realist, skeptical of the emotions, yet incessantly troubled by the fear of emotional failure--through close readings of such poems as "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock," "Gerontion," The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and many others. The heart of the book contains extended analyses of Eliot's two master works--The Waste Land and Four Quartets. Raine also examines Eliot's criticism--including his coinage of such key literary terms as the objective correlative, dissociation of sensibility, the auditory imagination--and he concludes with a convincing refutation of charges that Eliot was an anti-Semite.Here then is a volume absolutely indispensable for all admirers of T.S. Eliot and, in fact, for everyone who loves modern literature.
T. S. Eliot: a Guide for the Perplexed by
T. S. Eliot is one of the most celebrated twentieth-century poets and one whose work is practically synonymous with perplexity. Eliot is perceived as extremely challenging due to the multi-lingual references and fragmentation we find in his poetry and his recurring literary allusions to writers including Dante, Shakespeare, Marvell, Baudelaire, and Conrad. There is an additional difficulty for today's readers that Eliot probably didn't envisage: the widespread unfamiliarity with the Christianity that his work is steeped in. Steve Ellis introduces Eliot's work by using his extensive prose writings to illuminate the poetry. As a major critic, as well as poet, Eliot was highly conscious of the challenges his poetry set, of its relation to and difference from the work of previous poets, and of the ways in which the activity of reading was problematized by his work.
T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition by
T. S. Eliot was raised in the Unitarian faith of his family in St. Louis but drifted away from their beliefs while studying philosophy, mysticism, and anthropology at Harvard. During a year in Paris, he became involved with a group of Catholic writers and subsequently went through a gradual conversion to Catholic Christianity. Many studies of Eliot's writings have mentioned his religious beliefs, but most have failed to give the topic due weight, and many have misunderstood or misrepresented his faith. More recently, scholars have begun exploring this dimension of Eliot's thought more carefully and fully. In this book readers will find Eliot's Anglo-Catholicism accurately defined and thoughtfully considered. Essays illuminate the all-important influence of the French Catholic writers he came to know in Paris. Prominent among them were those who wrote for or were otherwise associated with the Nouvelle Revue Fran aise, including Andr Gide, Paul Claudel, and Charles-Louis Philippe. Also active in Paris at that time was the notorious Charles Maurras, whose influence on Eliot has been exaggerated by those who wished to discredit Eliot's traditionalist views. A more measured assessment of Maurras's influence has been needed and is found in several essays here. A wiser French Catholic writer, Jacques Maritain, has been largely ignored by Eliot scholars, but his influence is now given due consideration. The keynote of Eliot's cultural and political writings is his belief that religion and culture are integrally related. Several contributors examine his ideas on this subject, placing them in the context of Maritain's ideas, as well as those of the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson. Contributors take account of Eliot's intellectual relationship with such figures as John Henry Newman, Charles Williams, and the expert on church architecture, W. R. Lethaby. Eliot's engagement with other contemporaries who held a variety of Christian beliefs--including George Santayana, Paul Elmer More, C. S. Lewis, and David Jones--is also explored. This collection presents the subject of Eliot's religious beliefs in rich detail, from a number of different perspectives, giving readers the opportunity to see the topic in its complexity and fullness.
Territories of the Psyche: the Fiction of Jean Rhys by
Jean Rhys is widely credited for exposing issues of gender, nationality, race, and class in technically sophisticated, arresting narratives. Her lifelong exploration of the dynamics of the human psyche has, however, gone unrecognized. This examination places Rhys' fiction for the first time within the context of theories that reflect the interrelated perspectives of modern psychoanalysis. In clarifying accounts of many approaches that are new to literary scholars, as well as those that display the rich legacy of Freudian thought, Simpson shows that the paradigms of psychoanalysis illuminate the interpretation of Rhys' art. With insightful references to the short stories and close readings of her five novels, this study testifies to a remarkable achievement as Rhys recorded, with unflinching candor, the powerful drama of emotional life.
Wide Sargasso Sea by
The fortieth anniversary reissue of the best-selling "tour de force" (Walter Allen, New York Times Book Review).
