Land and Literature in a Cosmopolitan Age

Vincent P. Pecora is the Gordon B. Hinckley Presidential Professor of British Studies at the University of Utah. He has taught at the University of Arkansas (1984-85), the University of California, Los Angeles (1985-2005), and has directed summer seminars for the School of Criticism and Theory (2002) and the Social Science Research Council (2010 and 2014). He is the author of Self and Form in Modern Narrative (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), Households of the Soul (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2006), Secularization without End: Beckett, Mann, and Coetzee (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), and he is the editor of Nations and Identities: Classic Readings (Blackwell Publishers, 2001), and a founding co-editor of the on-line Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.

Yet this extraordinarily rich and erudite book is enlivened by a certain suspense.

• Prologue: Back to the Land After the Franco-Prussian War 1: Athens and Jerusalem: Autochthony, Promised Land, and the Roots of Western Aesthetics Part I: The Return of the Native: On the Autochthonous Imagination 2: 'After all, anybody is as their land and air is . . . ': The Ground of the Modern English Novel 3: Blood and Soil: Otto Brunner in 'Southeast Germany' 4: A Different Passage to India: Ashis Nandy, Indic Civilization, and the Defense of Innocence Part II: Deracination and Promised Land 5: George Eliot's Spot of a Native Land: Adam Bede Becomes Daniel Deronda 6: Ezekiel Chastises His People: The Counter-Reformation Argument of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land 7: Ezekiel Reclaims the Promised Land: T. S. Eliot and the Life of Significant Soil Epilogue: Attachment, Belonging, and Heidegger's Blue Heaven