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Literature
British and Irish Literature
Literary History
Twentieth-Century Literature
Chapter
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Chapter
“Fishing, with the arid plain behind me”: Weston’s From Ritual to Romance
Ten lines from the end of The Waste Land, a final Fisher King figure seems to be pondering his death, but with no apparent hope either for resurrection or any large-scale restoration contingent on his demise: “I...
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“Those are pearls that were his eyes”: Shakespeare’s Tempest
The thoughts of the man in the bedroom express deadness in a variety of ways. When the woman asks what he’s thinking, he responds: “I think we are in rats’ alley / Where the dead men lost their bones” (WL 115–1....
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“By the waters of Leman”: Eliot and Lake Leman
Tucked into the opening dozen lines of “The Fire Sermon” is a sentence that blends a verse from the Old Testament with a detail from Eliot’s own life: “By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept…” (WL 182; elli....
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“Shantih shantih shantih”: Upanishads
The Waste Land ends in Sanskrit: “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shantih shantih” (WL 433–44). “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata” reprises the legend of the thunder and its splitting of “DA” into “Give sympathise,...
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“And on the king my father’s death before him”: Shakespeare’s Tempest
“The Fire Sermon” begins with water, layering the River Thames (both Eliot’s desolate version and Spenser’s glistening one), Lake Leman (where Eliot worked on The Waste Land), and even the Old Testament rivers of...
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“Swallowed up in the one great tragedy”: World War I and The Waste Land
In September 1914, Eliot wrote a letter to his brother Henry describing his London neighborhood:
The noise hereabouts is like hell turned upside down. Hot weather, all windows open, many babies, p...
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Made in Mexborough
The premise and conclusion of this book beg some obvious questions. If Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire period was indeed so important to his development as ‘poet and personality’, why is this now so little known,...
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Introduction
Like many of her readers, Doris Lessing has repeatedly reread her most famous novel, The Golden Notebook (1962). She has always been alert to the ways in which the context of the reader can generate diverse inter...
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“The sound of horns and motors”: Day’s Parliament of Bees
Twice in “The Fire Sermon,” a speaker hears things behind him. The first time, as fall turns to winter, he hears “The rattle of the bones” (WL 186). The second time, as winter turns to spring, he hears “The sou....
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“When lovely woman stoops to folly”: Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield
In the first long sentence of the clerk-typist scene, the typist is described not as coming home but as being brought home, and even after she arrives at her flat, a grammatical blending suggests that the cleari...
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“Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem”: Weston’s From Ritual to Romance
Eliot opens his footnotes on The Waste Land by remarking: “Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested” (CP 70) by Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Ro...
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Conclusion: New Kids on the Virginia Woolf Block
A Poetics of Postmodernism and Neomodernism: Rewriting Mrs Dalloway has examined how the ‘kids on the Virginia Woolf block’1 have employed the ‘mythical method’,2 borrowed and appropriated Woolf’s legacy, and mad...
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Introduction: ‘Born into a Large Connection’
In A Sketch of the Past, towards the end of her life, Virginia Woolf was again considering her forebears and memorialising her past. She was wondering, ‘Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen, the second daught...
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Introduction
When asked about his politics, Woody Allen, whose film career and private life need no introduction, famously remarks via his character in Stardust Memories (1980), “I’m for total honest democracy. I also believe...
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Introduction
The map is a descriptive and navigational tool, just as the process of map** is one of simultaneous recognition and creation. Theresa Stopani, in an essay on map**, situates this multidirectional impulse as.....
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“The river sweats”: Wagner’s Götterdämmerung
Early in “The Fire Sermon,” the speaker records absence: “The wind / Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed” (WL 174–75). After the move from the typist’s flat to Lower Thames Street, though (....
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Introduction
The detail of Katherine Mansfield’s passport on the cover of this volume is a fitting illustration of how — although it was for London and England that she set out on her journey from her New Zealand home in 1...
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Epigraph
Eliot chose as epigraph for The Waste Land a tiny moment from an ancient work in which Trimalchio, the host of an extravagant dinner party, boasts that he has seen a famous prophet reduced to casual sideshow sta...
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“Pale Whore, Pale Writer”: Is There Punishment for the Crime?
What appears to be one of the more essential problems with Dostoyevsky’s poetics in Crime and Punishment deals, simply, with his occasional lapse into often using the wrong word at the wrong time. Beyond the mys...
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Interlude 1: scripturacontinuaconvivavoce
The development of literacy in the Western world is inherently bound up with the important role of orality (and aurality) in the reading of the written text. In Chapter 1, we have seen the poem as space to be a p...
