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9780521880022 - T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition - Edited by Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding
Frontmatter/Prelims

T. S. ELIOT AND THE CONCEPT OF TRADITION

T. S. Eliot’s reformulation of the idea of literary tradition has been one of the key critical concepts of the twentieth century. In this first book-length reappraisal of tradition, an international team of scholars explores the concept from a variety of theoretical and historical perspectives, including a series of illuminating case studies evaluating Eliot’s version of tradition alongside the theories of other major twentieth-century critics. This volume will be of great interest to students of literary theory, modernist studies and intellectual history, initiating a dialogue between Continental and Anglo-American investigations into the nature of literary traditions. Tradition is a concept often viewed by contemporary critics with misunderstanding or even hostility. This book powerfully reaffirms the continuing importance of our artistic and cultural traditions in shaping the past and creating the future.

GIOVANNI CIANCI is Professor of English Literature at the Università degli Studi di Milano.

JASON HARDING is Lecturer in English at the University of Durham.

Illustration from Triumphal March by T. S. Eliot, illustrated by E. McKnight Kauffer © Simon Rendall.

T. S. ELIOT AND THE CONCEPT OF TRADITION

EDITED BY

GIOVANNI CIANCI

AND

JASON HARDING

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

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© Cambridge University Press 2007

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First published 2007

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data
T. S. Eliot and the concept of tradition / edited by Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding.
p.  cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 215) and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-521-88002-2 (hardback)
ISBN-10: 0-521-88002-5 (hardback)
1. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas
Stearns), 1888–1965 – Influence. 3. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965 – Knowledge –
Literature. 4. American literature – 20th century – History and criticism – Theory, etc. 5. Influence
(Literary, artistic, etc.) – History – 20th century. 6. Criticism – United States – History – 20th
century. 7. Modernism (Literature) – United States. 8. Canon (Literature) 9. United States –
Intellectual life – 2oth century. I. Cianci, Giovanni. II. Harding, Jason. III. Title.
PS3509.L43Z872464 2007
821.912–dc22  2007013263

ISBN 978-0-521-88002-2 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for
the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or
third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such
websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgements

The conception of this volume emerged from the stimulating discussions that took place at the interdisciplinary conference ‘Re-Reading T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”’ held at the University of Milan in May 2004. We are grateful to the Rector for hosting this conference and to Alessandro Valenzisi and Marta Sironi for their organization of the exhibition ‘T. S. Eliot and the Avant-Garde’, documenting the modernist London artistic context in the years 1914–20. We would also like to thank Andrea Carosso, Emanuele Ferrari and Elio Franzini for their valuable contributions to these ‘catalytic’ proceedings.

Various people have provided assistance and support throughout the arduous process of readying this collection for publication. Nikky Twyman, Frances Whistler and Michael Foster helped with the copy-editing of individual chapters. The organizational skills of Marco Manunta have been invaluable. We are indebted to Valentina Pontolillo D’Elia for compiling the index. Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press for their constructive comments and Ray Ryan and Maartje Scheltens for their editorial care.

PERMISSIONS

We hereby acknowledge permission to cite copyright material as follows: The Cantos of Ezra Pound: Copyright © 1937, 1948 by Ezra Pound. Canti postumi by Ezra Pound: Copyright © 2002 by Omar Pound and Mary de Rachewiltz. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Unpublished Works by Ezra Pound: Copyright © 2007 by Omar Pound and Mary de Rachewiltz. Extracts from the writings of T. S. Eliot, Thom Gunn and Sylvia Plath: Copyright © Faber and Faber Ltd.

Notes on contributors

ALEIDA ASSMANN is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Konstanz. Two of her books, Spaces of Memory (1999) and Repression of History: Obsession with History (1999), have a strong interest in the study of memory as an individual, collective and cultural phenomena. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the universities of Rice in Texas, Princeton and Yale.

MASSIMO BACIGALUPO is Professor of American Literature at the University of Genoa. He has edited and translated T. S. Eliot’s Poesie 1905/1920 (1995) and also Pound’s Canti postumi (2002) – an annotated selection from Pound’s manuscripts, many of them never before published. His edition and translation of Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf received the Premio Fondazione Achille Marazza prize for 2003.

JEWEL SPEARS BROOKER is Professor of English at Eckerd College. She is the author or editor of eight books on modern literature, including Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism (1994) and (with Joseph Bentley) Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation (1990). In addition, she has edited The Placing of T. S. Eliot (1991), T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World (2001) and, most recently, T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews (2004) in the American Critical Archives series.

BERNARD BRUGIÈRE is Emeritus Professor at the University of the Sorbonne Nouvelle de Paris III. He has edited several volumes arising from the proceedings of the university research centre and has also published extensively in the fields of Victorian and twentieth-century literature. He has recently compiled a bilingual anthology of British poetry for Gallimard’s Pléiade collection.

GIOVANNI CIANCI is Professor of English Literature at the University of Milan. He is the author of La Scuola di Cambridge (1970) and La fortuna di Joyce in Italia: saggio e bibliografia, 1917–1972 (1974). In addition, he has edited several volumes: Wyndham Lewis: letteratura/pittura (1982), La Città 1830–1930 (1991), Il Cézanne degli scrittori, dei poeti e dei filosofi (2001) and (with Peter Nicholls) Ruskin and Modernism (2001). His most recent collection is Anglo-American Modernity and the Mediterranean (2006).

CLAUDIA CORTI is Professor of English at the University of Florence. She is interested in the relationship between literature and the visual arts. Her most recent publications are Shakespeare e gli emblemi (2002), Rivoluzione e rivelazione: William Blake tra profeti, radicali e giacobini (2000), Stupende fantasie: saggi su William Blake (2002) and Teatri e paesaggi: modi visivi del Romanticismo inglese (2004). She was recently nominated a member of the Accademia di Scienze e Lettere La Colombaria.

JASON HARDING is a Lecturer in English at the University of Durham. He is the author of The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (2002) and has published articles and reviews on modern literature in the Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books and Modernism/Modernity. He has contributed the concluding chapter, ‘Modernist Poetry and the Canon’, to The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (2007).

MICHAEL HOLLINGTON is Professor of English at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail. He previously taught at the University of New South Wales – where he held the chair of English – and as a lecturer in comparative literature at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of Dickens and the Grotesque (1984) and has published articles on Thomas Hardy, W. H. Hudson, D. H. Lawrence and the modernist novel.

SIR FRANK KERMODE has been Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English at University College, London, King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. He is a prolific author. Among his books are Romantic Image (1957), The Sense of an Ending (1967), The Classic (1975), Forms of Attention (1984), An Appetite for Poetry (1989) and Pieces of My Mind: Writings 1958–2002 (2003). He was knighted in 1991.

BRETT NEILSON is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of Western Sydney. He is the author of Free Trade in the Bermuda Triangle and Other Tales of Counter-Globalization (2004). He has also published extensively on modernist literature and culture. He is currently editing a volume on the global drugs trade for the Tracking Globalization series.

CAROLINE PATEY teaches English Literature at the University of Milan. She is the author of Tempi difficili: su Joyce e Proust (1991), Manierismo (1996) and Storie nella storia: teatro e politica nell’Inghilterra rinascimentale (2000). Her most recent publication is a study of Henry James and London, entitled Londra: Henry James e la capitale del moderno (2004). She is editing a volume of essays on James Joyce and memory.

MARJORIE PERLOFF is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities at Stanford University and currently Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Southern California. She has written numerous books, including The Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981), The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre and the Language of Rupture (1986), Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996), 21st Century Modernism (2002) and, most recently, The Vienna Paradox: A Cultural Memoir (2004) and Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (2004). She was 2006 President of the Modern Language Association.

MAX SAUNDERS is Professor of English at King’s College, London, where he teaches modern British, American and European literature. He is the author of a two-volume biography, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life (1996), and has edited Ford’s Selected Poems (1997), War Prose (1999) and (with Richard Stang) Critical Essays (2002). He has published essays on numerous authors, including Ford, Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Freud, Rosamund Lehmann, Richard Aldington, May Sinclair, D. H. Lawrence and Ruskin.

STAN SMITH is Research Professor of Literary Studies at Nottingham Trent University. He has published two books on W. H. Auden (1985 and 1997) and edited The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden (2004). Other books include Inviolable Voice: History and Twentieth-Century Poetry (1982), Edward Thomas (1986), W. B. Yeats: A Critical Introduction (1990), The Origins of Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats and the Rhetorics of Renewal (1994) and Irish Poetry and the Construction of Modern Identity (2005). Most recently he has edited Globalisation and its Discontents (2006) for the English Association in its centenary year. He is General Editor of the

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