A. Walton Litz – författare

This volume of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, first published in 2000, provides a thorough account of the critical tradition emerging with the modernist and avant-garde writers of the early twentieth century (Eliot, Pound, Stein, Yeats), continuing with the New Critics (Richards, Empson, Burke, Winters), and feeding into the influential work of Leavis, Trilling and others who helped form the modern institutions of literary culture. The core period covered is 1910-60, but explicit connections are made with nineteenth-century traditions and there is discussion of the implications of modernism and the New Criticism for our own time, with its inherited formalism, anti-sentimentalism, and astringency of tone. The book provides a companion to the other twentieth-century volumes of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, and offers a systematic and stimulating coverage of the development of the key literary-critical movements, with chapters on groups and genres as well as on individual critics.

The essays in this new collection, all by outstanding experts in the field of modern literature, provide a different and more complex sense of Eliot's place in literary history. The eight essays are: "The Waste Land Fifty Years After," by A. Walton Litz; "The Urban Apocalypse," by Hugh Kenner; "The First Waste Land:' by Richard Ellmann;" The Waste Land: Paris 1922," by Helen Gardner; "New Modes of Characterization in The Waste Land," by Robert Langbaum; "Precipitating Eliot," by Robert M. Adams; "Fear in the Way: The Design of Eliot's Drama," by Michael Goldman; and "Anglican Eliot," by Donald Davie. Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The essays in this new collection, all by outstanding experts in the field of modern literature, provide a different and more complex sense of Eliot's place in literary history. The eight essays are: "The Waste Land Fifty Years After," by A. Walton Litz; "The Urban Apocalypse," by Hugh Kenner; "The First Waste Land:' by Richard Ellmann;" The Waste Land: Paris 1922," by Helen Gardner; "New Modes of Characterization in The Waste Land," by Robert Langbaum; "Precipitating Eliot," by Robert M. Adams; "Fear in the Way: The Design of Eliot's Drama," by Michael Goldman; and "Anglican Eliot," by Donald Davie. Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

So that readers could more fully understand the extent of Williams' radical simplicity, all of his published poetry, excluding Paterson, was reissued in two definite volumes, of which this is the first.

If the invention of literary modernism is usually attributed to James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, it was Pound alone who provides (in Hugh Kenner’s words) “the synergetic presence” to convert individual experiment into an international movement. In 1926, Pound carefully sculpted his body of shorter poems into a definitive collection that would best show the concentration of force, the economy of means, and the habit of analysis that were, to him, the hallmarks of the new style. This collection, where Pound presented himself in a variety of characters or “masks,” was called Personae. In 1926, Personae’s publication gave solidity to a movement; today the work stands as one of the classic texts of the twentieth century. Pound scholars Lea Baechler (of Columbia) and A. Walton Litz (Holmes Professor of English Literature at Princeton) have prepared a corrected text and supplied an informative “Note on the Text” explaining both Pound’s original criteria for his selection and the volume’s subsequent history.

So that readers could more fully understand the extent of Williams' radical simplicity, all of his published poetry, excluding Paterson, was reissued in two definite volumes, of which this is the first.