The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot

In this Companion, an international team of leading T. S. Eliot scholars contribute studies of different facets of the writer's work to build up a carefully co-ordinated and fully rounded introduction. Five chapters give a complete account of Eliot's poems and plays from several distinct points of view. The major aspects and issues of his life and thought are assessed: his American origins and his becoming English; his position as a philosopher; his literary, social, and political criticism; and the evolution of his religious sense. Later chapters place his work in a number of historical perspectives; and the final chapter provides an expert review of the whole field of Eliot studies and is supplemented by a listing of the most significant publications. There is a useful chronological outline. Taken as a whole, the Companion comprises an essential handbook for students and other readers of Eliot.

Contents:

Where is the real T.S. Eliot? or, the life of the poet / James Olney
Eliot as a product of America / Eric Sigg
Eliot as philosopher / Richard Shusterman
T.S. Eliot's critical program / Timothy Materer
The Social critic and his discontents / Peter Dale Scott
Religion, literature, and society in the work of T.S. Eliot / Cleo McNelly Kearns
"England and nowhere" / Alan Marshall
Early poems: from "Prufrock" to "Gerontion" / J.C.C. Mays
Improper desire: reading The Waste land / Harriet Davidson
Ash-Wednesday: a poetry of verification / John Kwan-Terry
Four quartets: music, word, meaning and value / A. David Moody
Pereira and after: the cures of Eliot's theater / Robin Grove
"Mature poets steal": Eliot's allusive practice / James Longenbach
Eliot's impact on twentieth-century Anglo-American poetry / Charles Altieri
Tradition and T.S. Eliot / Jean-Michel Rabaté
Eliot: modernism, postmodernism, and after / Bernard Sharratt
Eliot studies: a review and a select booklist / Jewel Spears Brooker.