Twentieth Century American Fiction - T.S Eliot's Children

T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is known to be the epic of the twentieth century in its spirit and subject matter. It offers a new idiom to the whole generation of readers, writers, and researchers in crystallizing how to capture in words the submerged psychic currents of a fractured sensibility. In America it surprisingly turns out to be the most popular poem among the novelists and short story writers, perpetually used as a model for the reflection of American experience in a world ravaged by the two world wars. Eliot's intellectual rigor and vast erudition however has not been easy to emulate. The American novelists nevertheless have been continuously inspired by Eliot's innovative use of language, myths, metaphors, objective correlatives, allusions, symbols, images, and several other poetic short hands. We have today a whole clan of Eliot's children in America. The critical essays in the present anthology highlight an interesting persistence of The Waste Land syndrome in the twentieth century America fiction.

Sukhbir Singh is currently Professor of English at Osmania University, Hyderabad. Singh was given the Senior Fulbright Fellowship (1994-95) for studying Saul Bellow's literary manuscripts at the University of Chicago, IL. He has authored and edited about half a dozen books, and his articles, essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in about two dozen national and international journals. He has attended several national and international conferences and lectured widely at some of the prestigious universities in India and abroad. Vanashree is a Professor at the Department of English, Banaras Hindu University. She has been working on diverse fields of Literature. Her more than two dozen articles and four books demonstrate her specialization in authors ranging from Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, Hemingway to contemporary literatures in English and literary theory. Her recent publication: Three Plays of Girish Karnad: A Study in Poetics and Culture is the first detailed study of the playwright's dramatics.

The Editors thankfully acknowledge the re-print permissions of the following: Editor, Edith Wharton Review, for Monica Elbert's "T.S. Eliot and Wharton's Modernist Gothic." All rights reserved. Publisher, South Atlantic Quarterly, for Bernard Baum's "Willa Cather's Waste Land." Copyright 1949, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Editor, Virginia Quarterly Review, for John W. Bicknell's "The Waste Land of F. Scott Fitzgerald." All rights reserved. Publisher, The Southern Literary Journal, for Mary McGann's "The Waste Land and The Sound and the Fury: To Apprehend the Human Process Moving in Time." Copyright the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Editor, The Hemingway Review, for George Murphy's "Hemingway's Waste Land." Copyright 1971 by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. All rights reserved. Joseph Bents for "Wolfe and the Wastelanders: T.S. Eliot's Influence on The Hound of Darkness." Reprinted from The Thomas Wolfe Review by the permission of the Author. The Johns Hopkins University Press for Donna Gerstenberger's "Steinbeck's American Waste Land." Copyright Purdue Research Foundation.

Even though Eliot was not a fervent reader of fiction, his initial literary interests indicated a natural propensity in him toward detective stories, romances, myths, and leg ends. His early fascination for fictional works later led him to study some of the leading European and American novelists such as Stendhal, Meredith, Mann, Proust, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Emily Bronte, James, Joyce, Lawrence, Poe, Twain, Hawthorne, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. Eliot read them with a serious purpose in view-to critically asses their works in his essays, reviews, interviews, lectures, and let ters. And, he did it in the same spirit and with a similar intention as in the case of Dante, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Webster, Dryden, Wordsworth, Arnold, and W.B. Yeats. By this reassessment of these writers, he in fact wanted to penetrate into the European literary tradition for acceptance, eminence, and immortality. And he indeed became an integral part of it and remained a haunting presence even after his death. An avid votary of objectivity, Eliot was highly impressionistic in his criticism of the novel. For that reason, he profusely praised Charles Dickens, James Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis who were immediately relevant to his poetry for their universality. And, he severely condemned Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, and Alduous Huxley, who did not serve his immediate purpose, for their immorality. But, then, we are here concerned not so much with the quality or character of Eliot's criticism as with his keen sensitivity to new developments in the field of fiction in his time. This makes one curious to know whether he had a subliminal desire to write novels and had a novelist hidden somewhere deep in him. We would possibly find an answer by taking yet another look at the structure and substance of The Waste Land (1922) whether it bore the stamp of Eliot's fictional bent of mind.

**Contents and Sample Pages**