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.

About the Author

Lawrence Rainey is professor and chair in modernist literature, Department of English, University of York. He is the author of Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture, published by Yale University Press.

Reviews
"'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."



Book Information
ISBN 9780300123722
Author Lawrence Rainey
Format Paperback
Page Count 224
Imprint Yale University Press
Publisher Yale University Press
Weight(grams) 340g