The International Reception of T. S. Eliot

(Hardback)

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The International Reception of T. S. Eliot brings together a wide range of international perspectives on this influential twentieth-century author, who as poet, critic, and editor did much to shape modernist poetics, not only in Europe and North America, but also world-wide. Foregrounding distinct aspects of Eliot's international reception, individual chapters of the book illuminate such topics as Eliot's complex impact on the development of modernist poetics in the post-colonial Caribbean, the emergent state of Israel, and colonial India; the insurgent potential of translated Eliot in Soviet-occupied Romania and post-war Germany; the different ways in which Eliot's work has entered the cultural life of national and emergent national contexts like Iceland, Italy, Spain, China, and Japan; the relationships forged with Eliot's poetry and criticism by such authors as Jorge Borges, Czeslaw Milosz, A.J.M. Smith, and E.R. Curtius; the unique reverberations of Eliot's work in the bi-cultural lives of contemporary scholars; and the challenges of teaching Eliot across boundaries of culture and religion. Importantly broadening the purview of Anglo-American Eliot Studies, the book should prove essential reading for scholars around the world interested in Eliot and modernism, as well as post-colonial theory and modernist translation theory.

Reviews

"In a valuable contribution to the internationalization of modernist studies, the essays in this collection illuminate the cross-national, cross-cultural, even cross-hemispheric dialogue between Eliot and his global interlocutors. Exploring how writers from the Caribbean to Germany and Spain, to India, China, and Japan have absorbed and refashioned Eliot's work, these essays trace the fascinating transmutations of Eliot in an astonishing array of local traditions and indigenous languages across the world." - Professor Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia, USA.
"An important contribution of the book as a whole is the insight it provides into those aspects of Eliot's poetry, drama and critical essays which exerted the most influence on the countries represented. . . [It] contains a number of insightful and interesting essays which reveal in a variety of approaches the truly global influence of Eliot. Its most valuable contribution to Eliot scholarship is in its opening up for further study the impact of his works throughout the world." - Nancy D. Hargrove, Review of English Studies
"Addressing a Washington University audience in 1953, T. S. Eliot opined that for an author to have enduring significance abroad, foreign readers must identify with aspect of his or her work...Dumer and Bagchee's collection, while necessarily limited as a pioneering effort to recognize Eliot's worldwide reception, is commendable in its attempt to negotiate the complex issues that arise at junctures of cultural interface. As this book demonstrates, the Eliot that has emerged on the other side of these borders has often differed from the poet-critic Anglo-American readers know. More compellingly, and to the great credit of this volume, readers will undoubtedly recognize identity as well as difference.'" - John D. Morgenstern, Time Present: The Newsletter of the T.S. Eliot Society, January 2009 (Also listed in T.S. Eliot Bibliography 2007).
This collection gathers fragments of Eliot's influence from five continents and more than a dozen countries...students of Eliot are left with a broader, more nuanced understanding of his work and its significance.' -- Oxford Journals
Reviewed in Routledge ABES

Author Bio

Elisabeth Dumer is Professor of English at Eastern Michigan University, USA. Shyamal Bagchee is Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada, and was President of the T. S. Eliot Society of America (2001-03).