Revisiting "The Waste Land"

This groundbreaking book of literary detective work alters our understanding of T. S. Eliot's poetic masterpiece, "The Waste Land." Lawrence Rainey not only resolves longstanding mysteries surrounding the composition of the poem but also overturns traditional interpretations of the poem that have prevailed for more than eighty years. He shines new light on Eliot's greatest achievement and on the poem's place in the modern canon. Far from the austere and sober monument to neoclassicism that admirers have praised, "The Waste Land "turns out to be something quite different: something grim and wild, unruly and intractable, violent and shocking and radically indeterminate, yet also deeply compassionate. Rainey looks at how Eliot went about writing the poem and at the sequence in which he composed the parts. Arriving at new insights into the poet's intentions, Rainey unsettles tradition-bound views of the poem and shows us that "The Waste Land "is even stranger and more startling than we knew.

ISBN 0300123728   Pages 224 ISBN13 9780300123722 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Yale University Press   Weight (grammes) 322 Imprint Yale University Press   Published in New Haven Format Paperback   Height (mm) 234 Publication date 01 Jun 2007   Width (mm) 156 DEWEY 821.912   Spine width (mm) 13 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level Professional / Scholarly, General

"'The most significant contribution to Eliot scholarship since the facsimile edition of the manuscripts appeared in 1971.' Ronald Schuchard, Emory University 'Rainey's research rises from original scholarship to creative criticism, entering sympathetically into the lyrical process and restoring the written fact of the poem to the reader." Jeremy Noel-Tod, Times Literary Supplement Revisiting "The Waste Land" and The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose are the winners of the 2006 Robert Motherwell Book Award for outstanding publications in the history and criticism of modernism in the arts."

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