Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context / Edition 2

by Louis Menand

Overview

When Discovering Modernism was first published, it shed new and welcome light on the birth of Modernism. This reissue of Menand's classic intellectual history of T.S. Eliot and the singular role he played in the rise of literary modernism features an updated Afterword by the author, as well as a detailed critical appraisal of the progression of Eliot's career as a poet and critic. The new Afterword was adapted from Menand's critically lauded essay on Eliot in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume Seven: Modernism and the New Criticism. Menand shows how Eliot's early views on literary value and authenticity, and his later repudiation of those views, reflect the profound changes regarding the understanding of literature and its significance that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century. It will prove an eye-opening study for readers with an interest in the writings of T.S. Eliot and other luminaries of the Modernist era.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195159929
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	02/28/2007
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	8.00(w) x 5.30(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Louis Menand is Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University and former Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times bestseller The Metaphysical Club, and is a well-known essayist and critic for the New Yorker magazine. His next work will feature the art and thought of the Cold War period from 1945 to 1965.

Editorial Reviews

"A penetrating analysis. Menand is particularly successful in demonstrating the continuity of 19th-century ideas. Menand's thesis is that Eliot correctly analyzed the contradictions inherent in Modernist thought and that his genius lay in transforming those very contradictions into 'literary opportunities.'"--Library Journal (on the previous edition)

"Lively, clear, and intelligent. Menand has written better than anyone about Eliot's way of taking over and converting the old into something he needs, but needs in a different way."--Frank Kermode

"[The reader]...will find many rewards, including remarkable wit, elegant prose and wide erudition."--American Literature

From the Publisher