T. S. Eliot and Ideology

T. S. Eliot and Ideology PDF

Author: Kenneth Asher

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9780521627603

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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.

T. S. Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets

T. S. Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets PDF

Author: John Xiros Cooper

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1995-12-14

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0521496292

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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.

Christianity and Culture

Christianity and Culture PDF

Author: Thomas Stearns Eliot

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 1960

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9780156177351

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Two long essays: "The Idea of a Christian Society" on the direction of religious thought toward criticism of political and economic systems; and "Notes towards the Definition of Culture" on culture, its meaning, and the dangers threatening the legacy of the Western world.

Criticism and Ideology

Criticism and Ideology PDF

Author: Terry Eagleton

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1789602378

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Terry Eagleton is one of the most important-and most radical-theorists writing today. His witty and acerbic attacks on contemporary culture and society are read and enjoyed by many, and his studies of literature are regarded as classics of contemporary criticism. In this new edition of his groundbreaking treatise on literary theory, Eagleton seeks to develop a sophisticated relationship between Marxism and literary criticism. Ranging across the key works of Raymond Williams, Lenin, Trotsky, Brecht, Adorno, Benjamin, Lukacs and Sartre, he develops a nuanced critique of traditional literary criticism while producing a compelling theoretical account of ideology. Eagleton uses this perspective to offer fascinating analyses of canonical writers, including George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence. The new introduction sets this classic book in the context of its first appearance and Eagleton provides illuminating reflections on the progress of literary study over the years.

The Well Wrought Urn

The Well Wrought Urn PDF

Author: Cleanth Brooks

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 1947

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 9780156957052

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Critical analyses of ten English poems reveal changing styles from Donne to Yeats.

Phantom Formations

Phantom Formations PDF

Author: Marc Redfield

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-03-15

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1501723170

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Marc Redfield maintains that the literary genre of the Bildungsroman brings into sharp focus the contradictions of aesthetics, and also that aesthetics exemplifies what is called ideology. He combines a wide-ranging account of the history and theory of aesthetics with close readings of novels by Goethe, George Eliot, and Gustave Flaubert. For Redfield, these fictions of character formation demonstrate the paradoxical relation between aesthetics and literature: the notion of the Bildungsroman may be expanded to apply to any text that can be figured as a subject producing itself in history, which is to say any text whatsoever. At the same time, the category may be contracted to include only a handful of novels, (or even none at all), a paradox that has led critics to denigrate the Bildungsroman as a phantom genre.

T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition

T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition PDF

Author: Benjamin G. Lockerd

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-06-18

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1611476127

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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 Française, including André 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.

The Philosophy of Poetry

The Philosophy of Poetry PDF

Author: John Gibson

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0199603677

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In recent years philosophers have produced important books on nearly all the major arts: the novel and painting, music and theatre, dance and architecture, conceptual art and even gardening. Poetry is the sole exception. This is an astonishing omission, one this collection of original essays will correct. If contemporary philosophy still regards metaphors such as 'Juliet is the sun' as a serious problem, one has an acute sense of how prepared it is to make philosophical and aesthetic sense of poems such W. B. Yeats's 'The Second Coming', Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy', or Paul Celan's 'Todesfuge'. The Philosophy of Poetry brings together philosophers of art, language, and mind to expose and address the array of problems poetry raises for philosophy. In doing so it lays the foundation for a proper philosophy of poetry, setting out the various puzzles and paradoxes that future work in the field will have to address. Given its breadth of approach, the volume is relevant not only to aesthetics but to all areas of philosophy concerned with meaning, truth, and the communicative and expressive powers of language more generally. Poetry is the last unexplored frontier in contemporary analytic aesthetics, and this volume offers a powerful demonstration of how central poetry should be to philosophy.

T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe

T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe PDF

Author: Jayme Stayer

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2015-09-18

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1443883433

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In late 1910, after graduating from Harvard with a master’s degree in philosophy, the young T. S. Eliot headed across the Atlantic for a year of life and study in France, a country whose poets had already deeply affected his sensibility. His short year there was to change him even more decisively, as he rubbed up against the artistic, philosophical, psychological and political currents of early-century Paris. The absorbent mind of Eliot – as shaped by what he later termed “the mind of Europe” – was a node in this interlocking grid of influences. As there is no understanding T. S. Eliot without considering the impact of French art and thought on his development, this volume serves both as a centennial commemoration of Eliot’s year in Paris and as a reconsideration of the role of France and, more widely, Europe, as they bore on his growth as an artist and critic. Most scholarship on Eliot and France has focused on Eliot’s relationship to the nineteenth-century Symbolists and to the philosophy of Henri Bergson. This old frame of reference is broken apart in favor of a much wider field that still takes Paris as its center but reaches across national borders. The volume is divided into two overlapping sections: the first, “Eliot and France,” focuses on French authors and trends that shaped Eliot and on the personal experiences in Paris that are legible in his artistic development. The second section, “Eliot and Europe,” situates Eliot in a broader matrix, including Anglo-French literary theory, evolutionary sociology, and German influences. Contributors include several highly respected names in the field of modernist studies – including Jean-Michel Rabaté, Jewel Spears Brooker, and Joyce Wexler – as well as a number of well-established Eliot scholars. Reflecting multiple perspectives, this volume does not offer a single, revisionist take on French and European influence in Eliot’s work. Rather, it circles back to familiar territory, deepening and complicating the accepted narratives. It also opens up new veins of inquiry from unexpected sources and understudied phenomena, drawing on the recently published letters and essays that are currently remapping the field of Eliot studies.