Until now, Bergson's widely acknowledged impact on American literature has never been comprehensively mapped. Author Paul Douglass explains and evaluates Bergson's meaning for American writers, beginning with Eliot and moving through Ransom, Penn Warren, and Tate to Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, Henry Miller, William Carlos Williams, and others. It will be a standard point of reference. Bergson was the continental philosopher of the early 1900s, a celebrity, as Sartre would later be. Profoundly influential throughout Europe, and widely discussed in England and America in the Teens, Twenties, and Thirties, Bergson is now rarely read. His current "obsolescence," Douglass argues, illuminates the Western shift from Modern to post- Modern. Ambitious in scope, this book remains admirably close to Bergson himself: what he said, where that fits in the historical context of philosophy, why his ideas moved across the Atlantic, and how he affected American writers. At the book's heart are readings of Eliot's criticism and poetry, analyses of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Light in August, and evaluations of Ransom's, Tate's and Penn Warren's criticism. This impressively researched and beautifully written study will remain of lasting value to students of American literature.

Mary Ann Gillies shows that French philosopher Henri Bergson played a central role in the development of British literary modernism. While Bergson's influence on modernism has long been debated, this is the first thorough, current examination of the ways

Study of Eliot's philosophical writings, assessing their impact on his early poetry and literary criticism.

A new view of the way modernist fiction writers tried to solve the problem of time. Do our fictions transform time? Do they cultivate the temporal environment? Such was the hope—or the fantasy—at work in many modernist novels for which time was not only the major subject but also an object of reparative aspiration. Aimed at a kind of stewardship of time, these fictions constitute a practice of modernist time ecology: an effort to restore those landscapes of time that have been thrown into crisis by modernity. In Modernist Time Ecology, Jesse Matz redefines temporal experimentation in central writers like Proust, Mann, Woolf, Ellison, and Cather, who developed literary forms to cultivate, restore, and enrich the temporal environment. He brings fresh attention to others who best exemplify this ecological motive, arguing that E. M. Forster, J. B. Priestley, and V. S. Naipaul are leading figures in this practice of temporal redress. Matz also reveals how contemporary film, social media movements, and public service efforts show what has become of the modernist interest in temporal stewardship. Matz combines an array of disciplines—including narrative theory, sociology, phenomenology, cognitive psychology, film studies, queer theory, and environmental studies—to theorize and explain the rationale and the limits to the idea that time might be subject to textual cultivation. Modernist Time Ecology is a deeply interdisciplinary book that changes what we think literature and the arts can do for the world at large.

When the Eternal Can Be Met excavates the philosophy behind the theology of the twentieth century's most prominent Christian writers: C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden. These three literary giants converted to Christianity within little more than a decade of one another, and interestingly, all three theological authors turned to the theme of time. All three authors also came to remarkably similar conclusions about time, positing that the temporal present moment allowed one to meet the eternal. Decades before Lewis, Eliot, and Auden sought to creatively construct a fictive or poetic theology of time, the prominent philosopher Henri Bergson wrote about time's power to transform an individual's emotional and spiritual state, a theory well known by Lewis, Eliot, and Auden. When the Eternal Can Be Met argues that one cannot fully understand Lewis, Eliot, and Auden's theology of time without understanding Bergson's theories. From the secular philosophy of Bergson dawned the most important works of literary theology and treatments of time of the twentieth century, and in the Bergson-influenced literary constructs of Lewis, Eliot, and Auden, a common theological articulation sounds out--time present is where humans meet God.

This volume supplements the acclaimed three volume set published in 1986 and consists of an annotated listing of American Studies monographs published between 1984 and 1988. There are more than 6,000 descriptive entries in a wide range of categories: anthropology and folklore, art and architecture, history, literature, music, political science, popular culture, psychology, religion, science and technology, and sociology.

Late in his life T. S. Eliot, when asked if his poetry belonged in the tradition of American literature, replied: “I’d say that my poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England. That I’m sure of. . . . In its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America.” In T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, James Miller offers the first sustained account of Eliot’s early years, showing that the emotional springs of his poetry did indeed come from America. Miller challenges long-held assumptions about Eliot’s poetry and his life. Eliot himself always maintained that his poems were not based on personal experience, and thus should not be read as personal poems. But Miller convincingly combines a reading of the early work with careful analysis of surviving early correspondence, accounts from Eliot’s friends and acquaintances, and new scholarship that delves into Eliot’s Harvard years. Ultimately, Miller demonstrates that Eliot’s poetry is filled with reflections of his personal experiences: his relationships with family, friends, and wives; his sexuality; his intellectual and social development; his influences. Publication of T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet marks a milestone in Eliot scholarship. At last we have a balanced portrait of the poet and the man, one that takes seriously his American roots. In the process, we gain a fuller appreciation for some of the best-loved poetry of the twentieth century.