The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem explores how cultural responses to the trauma of the First World War found expression in the form of the modernist long poem. Beginning with T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Oliver Tearle reads that most famous example of the genre in comparison with lesser known long poems, such as Hope Mirrlees's Paris: A Poem, Richard Aldington's A Fool I' the Forest and Nancy Cunard's Parallax. As well as presenting a new history of this neglected genre, the book examines the ways in which the modernist long poem represented the seminal literary form for grappling with the crises of European modernity in the wake of World War I.

Paris: A Poem is a daring, experimental, psychogeographic long poem written by the British writer Hope Mirrlees. Offering a snapshot of post-war Paris, it describes a journey through the city from day to night by means of innovative and playful typography, collage and fragmentation. This would be a centenary edition, reproducing the original design and setting of the very first, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press in 1920.

T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is often hailed as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement and the autobiography of the poet as a young man. However, what has often been critically underappreciated is the extent to which The Waste Land functions as a poem of the Great War, a war poem that captures the extent to which the First World War became a conflict unbounded by trench and no man's land, a war experienced by both civilian and soldier alike. Examining Eliot's personal connections to the front, his own experiences in pre-war Germany and wartime London, and the controversy surrounding poem's relation to Eliot's fallen friend, Jean Verdenal, the present essay argues that the reader of The Waste Land is benefited from considering the poem as belonging to the body of poetry which sought to express the horrors and experience of the Great War. Special attention is paid to possible connections Eliot's poem has with Ford Madox Ford's "In October, 1914 (Antwerp)," as well as how several of Eliot's critical ideas, including his well-known concepts of "the Tradition" and the "objective correlative," guide us towards an understanding of how The Waste Land was composed.

Line-by-line analysis of T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland--Cover.

Newly revised and in paperback for the first time, this definitive, annotated edition of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land "includes as a bonus""all the essays Eliot wrote as he was composing his masterpiece. Enriched with period photographs, a London map of cited locations, groundbreaking information on the origins of the work, and full annotations, the volume is itself a landmark in literary history. "More than any previous editor, Rainey provides the reader with every resource that might help explain the genesis and significance of the poem. . . . The most imaginative and useful edition of "The Waste Land" ever published."--Adam Kirsch, "New Criterion ""For the student or for anyone who wants to get the maximum amount of information out of a foundational modernist work, this is the best available edition."--"Publishers Weekly"

This is a book about two empires—America and Rome—and the forms of time we create when we think about them together. Ranging from the eighteenth century to the present day, through novels, journalism, film, and photography, Time and Antiquity in American Empire reconfigures our understanding of how cultural and political life has generated an analogy between Roman antiquity and the imperial US state—both to justify and perpetuate it, and to resist and critique it. The book takes in a wide scope, from theories of historical time and imperial culture, through the twin political pillars of American empire—republicanism and slavery—to the popular genres that have reimagined America's and Rome's sometimes strange orbit: Christian fiction, travel writing, and science fiction. Through this conjunction of literary history, classical reception studies, and the philosophy of history, however, Time and Antiquity in American Empire builds a more fundamental inquiry: about how we imagine both our politics and ourselves within historical time. It outlines a new relationship between text and context, and between history and culture; one built on the oscillating, dialectical logic of the analogy, and on a spatialising of historical temporality through the metaphors of constellations and networks. Offering a fresh reckoning with the historicist protocols of literary study, this book suggests that recognizing the shape of history we step into when we analogize with the past is also a way of thinking about how we have read—and how we might yet read.