A study of a literary success, and the forces that combine to create a successful literary movement, Discovering Modernism places T.S. Eliot in his cultural context to discover why his poetry and criticism answered the needs of a particular moment. Menand's analysis, which includes a reevaluation of the influence of Eliot's doctoral dissertation in philosophy on his later work, yields fresh readings of some familiar features of Eliot's style--the use of literary allusion, the valorization of "tradition," the critical formulae of the objective corrolative and the dissociation of sensibility, and the notes to The Waste Land. But this book is about more than T.S. Eliot. Because Menands's larger subject is the crisis in literature that produced Eliot and the entire Modernist movement, he examines the ways in which the literary values of the 19th century became problems for their 20th-century counterparts. With discussion of such topics as Conrad and the rise of professionalism, Darwinism and the late 19th century notion of style, Tennyson's posthumous reputation, and Pater and the Imagists, he contributes to our knowledge of the ties that bound Modernism to the 19th century, and sheds new light on how writers go about "making it new."
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About the Author:
Louis Menand is Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University and former Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times bestseller The Metaphysical Club, and is a well-known essayist and critic for the New Yorker magazine. His next work will feature the art and thought of the Cold War period from 1945 to 1965.
From Library Journal:
Marked with the rhetoric of the lecture hall, this book is nevertheless a penetrating analysis of the philosophical and critical context that enabled T. S. Eliot to compose "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and The Waste Land, the two works it discusses most thoroughly. Menand is particularly successful in demonstrating the continuity of 19th-century ideas, largely because of the abiding reputations of such critics as Walter Pater and William Hazlitt, thinkers who profoundly affected the work of Eliot and Ezra Pound. Menand's thesis is that Eliot correctly analyzed the contradictions inherent in Modernist thought and that his genius lay in transforming those very contradictions into "literary opportunities." Recommended for all research collections. Daniel L. Guillory, English Dept., Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.
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- PublisherOxford University Press
- Publication date1988
- ISBN 10 0195057171
- ISBN 13 9780195057171
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages222
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