T. S. Eliot greatly enhanced Dante's profound influence on European literature. The essays in this volume explore Dante's importance through a focus on Eliot. Probing the questions what Eliot made of Dante, and what Dante meant to Eliot, the essays here assess the legacy of modernism by engaging its "classicist" roots, covering a wide spectrum of topics stemming from Dante's relevance to the poetry and criticism of Eliot. The essays reflect on Eliot's aesthetic, philosophical, and religious convictions in relation to Dante, his influence upon literary modernism through his embracing and championing of the Florentine, and his desire to promote European unity. The first section of the book deals with aesthetic and philosophical issues related to Eliot's engagement with Dante, beginning with Jewel Spears Brooker's masterful essay on the concepts of immediate experience and primary consciousness in Eliot's work, and moving on to essays considering his idea of a "unified sensibility," as well as Eliot's engagement with Hindu-Buddhist and Christian themes and motifs. The second part of the book focuses on Dante's importance to Eliot's founding work in the modernist movement. In what ways did Dante directly and indirectly influence the exemplary path that Eliot blazed for his contemporaries, especially Ezra Pound? How early did Dante's influence show itself in Eliot's work? Why was he unable to complete the great trilogy he seems to have sought to write, based on Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso? These questions and their answers lead to the book's final section, which considers Eliot's (and Dante's) role in the formation of a twentieth-century concept of Europe. Incisive essays on Eliot's varied sources of "tradition" in his attempt to promote the idea of a European union and his anxiety over the heritage of Romanticism are capped by a magisterial contribution from Dominic Manganiello showing precisely how Eliot's reformulation of the Dantesque "European Epic" continues to influence the work of Anglo-European and Commonwealth writers.

In late 1910, after graduating from Harvard with a master’s degree in philosophy, the young T. S. Eliot headed across the Atlantic for a year of life and study in France, a country whose poets had already deeply affected his sensibility. His short year there was to change him even more decisively, as he rubbed up against the artistic, philosophical, psychological and political currents of early-century Paris. The absorbent mind of Eliot – as shaped by what he later termed “the mind of Europe” – was a node in this interlocking grid of influences. As there is no understanding T. S. Eliot without considering the impact of French art and thought on his development, this volume serves both as a centennial commemoration of Eliot’s year in Paris and as a reconsideration of the role of France and, more widely, Europe, as they bore on his growth as an artist and critic. Most scholarship on Eliot and France has focused on Eliot’s relationship to the nineteenth-century Symbolists and to the philosophy of Henri Bergson. This old frame of reference is broken apart in favor of a much wider field that still takes Paris as its center but reaches across national borders. The volume is divided into two overlapping sections: the first, “Eliot and France,” focuses on French authors and trends that shaped Eliot and on the personal experiences in Paris that are legible in his artistic development. The second section, “Eliot and Europe,” situates Eliot in a broader matrix, including Anglo-French literary theory, evolutionary sociology, and German influences. Contributors include several highly respected names in the field of modernist studies – including Jean-Michel Rabaté, Jewel Spears Brooker, and Joyce Wexler – as well as a number of well-established Eliot scholars. Reflecting multiple perspectives, this volume does not offer a single, revisionist take on French and European influence in Eliot’s work. Rather, it circles back to familiar territory, deepening and complicating the accepted narratives. It also opens up new veins of inquiry from unexpected sources and understudied phenomena, drawing on the recently published letters and essays that are currently remapping the field of Eliot studies.

While most critical studies of interwar literary politics have focused on nationalism, Patrick Query makes a case that the idea of Europe intervenes in instances when the individual and the nation negotiate identity. He examines the ways interwar writers use three European ritual forms-verse drama, bullfighting, and Roman Catholic rite-to articulate ideas of European cultural identity. Within the growing discourse of globalization, Query argues, Europe presents a special, though often overlooked, case because it adds a mediating term between local and global. His book is divided into three sections: the first treats the verse dramas of T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and W.H. Auden; the second discusses the uses of the Spanish bullfight in works by D.H. Lawrence, Stephen Spender, Jack Lindsay, George Barker, Cecil Day Lewis, and others; and the third explores the cross-cultural impact of Catholic ritual in Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and David Jones. While all three ritual forms were frequently associated with the most conservative tendencies of the age, Query shows that each had a remarkable political flexibility in the hands of interwar writers concerned with the idea of Europe.

This book offers a new critical history of the idea of Europe from classical antiquity to the present day.

How and why did a country seen as remote, backwards, and barely European become a pivotal site for reinventing the continent after the Great War? Modernism and the New Spain argues that the "Spanish problem"-the nation's historically troubled relationship with Europe-provided an animating impulse for interwar literary modernism and for new conceptions of cosmopolitanism. Drawing on works in a variety of genres, Gayle Rogers reconstructs an archive of cross-cultural exchanges to reveal the mutual constitution of two modernist movements-one in Britain, the other in Spain, and stretching at key moments in between to Ireland and the Americas. Several sites of transnational collaboration form the core of Rogers's innovative literary history. The relationship between T. S. Eliot's Criterion and José Ortega y Gasset's Revista de Occidente shows how the two journals joined to promote a cosmopolitan agenda. A similar case of kindred spirits appears with the 1922 publication of Joyce's Ulysses. The novel's forward-thinking sentiments on race and nation resonated powerfully within Spain, where a generation of writers searched for non-statist forms through which they might express a new European Hispanicity. These cultural ties between the Anglo-Irish and Spanish-speaking worlds increased with the outbreak of civil war in 1936. Rogers explores the connections between fighting Spanish fascism and dismantling the English patriarchal system in Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, along with the international, anti-fascist poetic community formed by Stephen Spender, Manuel Altolaguirre, and others as they sought to establish Federico García Lorca as an apolitical Spanish-European poet. Mining a rich array of sources that includes novels, periodicals, biographies, translations, and poetry in English and in Spanish, Modernism and the New Spain adds a vital new international perspective to modernist studies, revealing how writers created alliances that unified local and international reforms to reinvent Europe not in the London-Paris-Berlin nexus, but in Madrid.

This book is about the history of Europe in the twentieth century and concentrates on two particular aspects. First, it examines the impact of the Great War on Europe; secondly it is concerned with European civilization and with ideas of what is meant to be 'European'. The approach is interdisciplinary, including integrated analyses from politics, international relations, political ideas, literature, and the visual arts. The common focus, which links all the chapters, is the effect of the Great War on a European mentality, or European identity. It targets reactions to the First World War up to 1939, but extends its coverage in many areas up to the 1990s, offering a wide-ranging view of Europe in the twentieth century.

T. S. Eliot was raised in the Unitarian faith of his family in St. Louis but drifted away from their beliefs while studying philosophy, mysticism, and anthropology at Harvard. During a year in Paris, he became involved with a group of Catholic writers and subsequently went through a gradual conversion to Catholic Christianity. Many studies of Eliot's writings have mentioned his religious beliefs, but most have failed to give the topic due weight, and many have misunderstood or misrepresented his faith. More recently, scholars have begun exploring this dimension of Eliot's thought more carefully and fully. In this book readers will find Eliot's Anglo-Catholicism accurately defined and thoughtfully considered. Essays illuminate the all-important influence of the French Catholic writers he came to know in Paris. Prominent among them were those who wrote for or were otherwise associated with the Nouvelle Revue Française, including André Gide, Paul Claudel, and Charles-Louis Philippe. Also active in Paris at that time was the notorious Charles Maurras, whose influence on Eliot has been exaggerated by those who wished to discredit Eliot's traditionalist views. A more measured assessment of Maurras's influence has been needed and is found in several essays here. A wiser French Catholic writer, Jacques Maritain, has been largely ignored by Eliot scholars, but his influence is now given due consideration. The keynote of Eliot's cultural and political writings is his belief that religion and culture are integrally related. Several contributors examine his ideas on this subject, placing them in the context of Maritain's ideas, as well as those of the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson. Contributors take account of Eliot's intellectual relationship with such figures as John Henry Newman, Charles Williams, and the expert on church architecture, W. R. Lethaby. Eliot's engagement with other contemporaries who held a variety of Christian beliefs—including George Santayana, Paul Elmer More, C. S. Lewis, and David Jones—is also explored. This collection presents the subject of Eliot's religious beliefs in rich detail, from a number of different perspectives, giving readers the opportunity to see the topic in its complexity and fullness.