T.S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature, for the first time, considers the full imaginative and moral engagement of one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot, with the Early Modern period of literature in English (1580-1630). This engagement haunted Eliot's poetry and critical writing across his career, and would have a profound impact on subsequent poetry across the world, as well as upon academic literary criticism, and wider cultural perceptions. To this end, the book elucidates and contextualizes several facets of Eliot's thinking and its impact: through establishment of his original and eclectic understanding of the Early Modern period in relation to the literary and critical source materials available to him; through consideration of uncollected and archival materials, which suggest a need to reassess established readings of the poet's career; and through attention to Eliot's resonant formulations about the period in consequent literary, critical and artistic arenas. To the end of his life, Eliot had to fend off the presumption that he had, in some way, 'invented' the Early Modern period for the modern age. Yet the presumption holds some force - it is famously and influentially an implication running through Eliot's essays on that earlier period, and through his many references to its writings in his poetry, that the Early Modern period formed the most exact historical analogy for the apocalyptic events (and consequent social, cultural and literary turmoil) of the first half of the twentieth-century. T.S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature gives a comprehensive sense of the vital engagement of this self-consciously modern poet with the earlier period he always declared to be his favourite.

T.S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature

Literature & Fiction

Matthews, Steven

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

Presents a genealogy of Irish poetry which centers on 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Seamus Heaney, and his continuing preoccupation with the relations between poetry, politics, and history. Matthews (English, U. of Leeds) also discusses the work of John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon, John Montague, Thomas Kinsella, Brendan Kennelly, and Ciaran Carson; and he analyzes how these poets have reacted to the influence of W.B. Yeats. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Irish Poetry: Politics, History, Negotiation : The Evolving Debate, 1969 to the Present

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

The early Twentieth Century produced some of the most exhilarating literature in the English language. Writers from Britain, America and Ireland challenged literary conventions as their perspectives evolved in a dynamic but newly unsettling world. Social pressures, urbanization, new technologies, and political activism from women's groups and others within the British Empire, all raised the awareness of writers and prompted them to rethink and reshape their work. In addition, intellectual and literary debates from the late nineteenth century lingered into the next century and World War I provided a shocking jolt to the established ways of life and changed a generation of writers and the course of literature.
This book considers the major authors and texts of the modernist period, mapping the literary alongside the historical, social and literary issues of the time. It provides a clear overview and analysis of works by Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster and many others.

Modernism (Contexts)

Bloomsbury Academic

Rewriting the Thirties questions the myth of the 'anti-modernist' decade. Conversely, the editors argue it is a symptomatic, transitional phase between modern and post-modern writing and politics, at a time of cultural and technological change. The text reconsiders some of the leading writers of the period in the light of recent theoretical developments, through essays on the ambivalent assimilation of Modernist influences, among proletarian and canonical novelists including James Barke and George Orwell, and among poets including Auden, MacNeice, Swingler and Bunting, and in the work of feminist writers Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby. In this substantial remapping, the complexity and scope of literary-critical debate at the time is discussed in relation to theatrical innovation, audience attitudes to the mass medium of modernity - cinema - the poetics of suburbia, consumerism and national ideology, as well as the discursive strategies of British and American documentarism.

Rewriting the Thirties (Longman Studies In Twentieth Century Literature)

Williams, Keith

Routledge

In the only full critical study of Les Murray's work that is available, Steven Matthews provides a complete account of the poet's career to date. A controversial figure, Murray's version of Australian republicanism has caused heated argument about the future direction of his country as it moves away from its colonial past. With detailed readings of major poems, and literary and cultural contexts surrounding the work, Matthews gives an overview of Murray's place in Australian literature and national thought.

Les Murray (Contemporary World Writers)

Manchester University Press

Les Murray is amongst the most gifted poets writing today, his multi-faceted talents have received high praise both in his native Australia and beyond. But he has also proved a controversial figure, whose poetry strays across the boundaries of political and cultural debate. The only full critical study of Murray's work available, Steven Matthews provides a complete picture of his career to date, from its early parables of national emergence to the working man's epic encounter with the major events of the twentieth century, Fredy Neptune. Provides detailed readings of key poems, as well as literary and cultural contexts for the rapid shifts in style and subject matter Murray has made from collection to collection. Gives an overview of Murray's place within Australian literature and national thought.

Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon

History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Beckett and Cioran (Elements in Beckett Studies)

British & Irish

Cambridge University Press

This study re-evaluates the religious beliefs of Francis Bacon and the role which his theology played in the development of his program for the reform of learning and the natural sciences, the Great Instauration. Bacon's Instauration writings are saturated with theological statements and Biblical references which inform and explain his program, yet this aspect of his writings has received little attention. Previous considerations of Bacon's religion have been drawn from a fairly short list of his published writings. Consequently, Bacon has been portrayed as everything from an atheist to a Puritan; scholarly consensus is lacking. This book argues that by considering the historical context of Bacon's society, and his conversion from Puritanism to anti-Calvinism as a young man, his own theology can be brought into clearer focus, and his philosophy more properly understood. After leaving his mother's household, Bacon underwent a transformation of belief which led him away from his mother's Calvinism and toward the writings of the ancient Church Fathers, particularly Irenaeus of Lyon. Bacon's theology increasingly came to reflect the theological interests of his friend and editor Lancelot Andrewes. The patristic turn of Bacon's belief in the last two decades of the reign of Elizabeth significantly affected the development of his philosophical program which was produced in the first two decades of the Stuart era. This study then examines the theology present in the Instauration writings themselves and concludes with a consideration of the effect which Bacon's theology had on the subsequent direction of empirical science and natural theology in the English context. In so doing it not only offers a new perspective on Bacon, but will serve as a contribution toward a better understanding of the religious context of, and motivations behind, empirical science in early modern England.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Matthews, Steven. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Matthews, Steven

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Matthews, Steven. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

T.S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature

Irish Poetry: Politics, History, Negotiation : The Evolving Debate, 1969 to the Present

Modernism (Contexts)

Rewriting the Thirties (Longman Studies In Twentieth Century Literature)

Les Murray (Contemporary World Writers)

Les Murray (Contemporary World Writers)

Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon

Beckett and Cioran (Elements in Beckett Studies)

Beckett and Cioran (Elements in Beckett Studies)

Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon