Modernism, memory, and desire : T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf / Gabrielle McIntire.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McIntire, Gabrielle.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965--Criticism and interpretation.

Eliot, T. S.

Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941--Criticism and interpretation.

Woolf, Virginia.

Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941.

Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965.

Memory in literature.

Desire in literature.

Modernism (Literature).

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

x, 264 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Summary:

T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf were almost exact contemporaries, readers and critics of each others' work, and friends for over twenty years. Their writings, though, have never been paired in a book-length study. Modernism, Memory, and Desire proposes that some striking correspondences exist in Eliot's and Woolf's poetic, fictional, critical, and autobiographical texts, particularly in their recurring turn to the language of the body, desire, and sensuality to render memory's processes. The book includes extensive archival research on some mostly unknown bawdy poetry by T. S. Eliot while offering new readings of major work by both writers, including The Waste Land, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Orlando, and To the Lighthouse. McIntire juxtaposes Eliot and Woolf with several major modernist thinkers of memory, including Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Walter Benjamin, to offer compelling reconsiderations of the relation between textuality, remembrance, and the body in modernist literature.

Contents:

An unexpected beginning : sex, race, and history in T.S. Eliot's Columbo and Bolo poems

Mixing memory and desire : rereading Eliot and the body of history

Eliot, eros, and desire : "oh, do not ask, 'what is it?'"

T.S. Eliot : writing time and blasting memory

Virginia Woolf, (auto)biography, and the eros of memory : reading Orlando

Other kinds of autobiographies : sketching the past, forgetting Freud, and reaching the lighthouse

Remembering what has "almost already been forgotten" : where memory touches history.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 214-247) and index.

ISBN:

0521877857

9780521877855

OCLC:

163614139

Online:

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