Eliot Now
Megan Quigley editor David E Chinitz editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:7th Aug '25
Should be back in stock very soon
Eliot Now—the first collection of essays written with full access to T. S. Eliot’s recently published Complete Prose and Poems—combines contemporary critical approaches with a sustained inquiry into the new archive of this major modernist poet, transforming the Eliot we thought we knew.
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.
A provocation and an inspiration, Eliot Now is the essential guide to reading T.S. Eliot in the twenty-first century. * Rebecca Beasley, Professor of Modernist Studies, University of Oxford, UK *
This is an important book which should appeal to a wide range of scholars--those new to Eliot's poetry and prose as well as those who've been reading his work for many years. The collection makes use of the recently published Eliot materials now available to us all and also considers Eliot's work from fresh perspectives * John Whittier-Ferguson, Professor of English, University of Michigan, USA *
Multifaceted, polyvocal, and heterogenous, this thrilling collection speaks in different voices, from different viewpoints, like the endlessly proliferating poet who is its subject. Its centripetal force will unleash further debates and provocations for years to come. * Jahan Ramazani, University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor at the University of Virginia, USA *
Eliot Now aims to restart the project of reading and understanding the most dominant and the most enigmatic Anglophone poet of the 20th century. Drawing on the vast amounts of previously unknown material—poems, prose, and letters—that have appeared over the last few decades, the contributors to this collection reopen old questions and propose new ones. Some aspects of the life, particularly the long relationship with Emily Hale, emerge more fully known and yet remain more deeply mysterious than ever before. And readings of the poetry, especially by a group of contemporary poets, show why it still has the freshness that first made it so startling. * Michael North, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, UCLA, USA *
ISBN: 9781350564169
Dimensions: 234mm x 156mm x 20mm
Weight: 437g
288 pages