T. S. Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets

by John Xiros Cooper

Overview

Recent criticism of Eliot has ignored the public dimension of his life and work. Professor Cooper shows how Eliot consciously addressed the fears of a North Atlantic "mandarinate" during the politically turbulent 1930s. Immediately following publication, Four Quartets was accorded canonical status as a work offering a personal harmony divorced from the painful disharmonies of the emerging postwar world. This powerful study reestablishes 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521060912
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	04/24/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

Table of Contents

1. Ash-Wednesday and the transition to the late candour; 2. Provisional delusions: crisis among the mandarins; 3. The society of the mandarin verse play; 4. Representing Four Quartets: the canonizers at work; 5. Four Quartets: the poem proper i. Burnt children ii. Rehearsing renunciation iii. Escape from history; 6. White mythology: the comedy of manners in Natopolis; Notes; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"...Cooper impressively places Eliot in a relation to his readers and the complexities of the world around him that is too rarely considered in a great deal of scholarship on this poet. ...much of value here." Colin A. Clarke, American Studies International

From the Publisher