Lawrence Rainey – författare

This groundbreaking book of literary detective work alters our understanding of T. S. Eliot’s poetic masterpiece, The Waste Land. Lawrence Rainey not only resolves longstanding mysteries surrounding the composition of the poem but also overturns traditional interpretations of the poem that have prevailed for more than eighty years. He shines new light on Eliot’s greatest achievement and on the poem’s place in the modern canon. Far from the austere and sober monument to neoclassicism that admirers have praised, The Waste Land turns out to be something quite different: something grim and wild, unruly and intractable, violent and shocking and radically indeterminate, yet also deeply compassionate. Rainey looks at how Eliot went about writing the poem and at the sequence in which he composed the parts. Arriving at new insights into the poet’s intentions, Rainey unsettles tradition-bound views of the poem and shows us that The Waste Land is even stranger and more startling than we knew.

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.

Modernism: An Anthology is the most comprehensive anthology of Anglo-American modernism ever to be published. Amply represents the giants of modernism - James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Samuel Beckett.Includes a generous selection of Continental texts, enabling readers to trace modernism's dialogue with the Futurists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and the Frankfurt School.Supported by helpful annotations, and an extensive bibliography.Allows readers to encounter anew the extraordinary revolution in language that transformed the aesthetics of the modern world.