T S Eliot: Prufrock and The Waste Land

about

“Prufrock” is as fresh today as when it was first written, and, for better or worse, The Waste Land remains the celebrated poem of its age, a text that may be venerated, despised, rejected or enjoyed, but not ignored. C J Ackerley, author of this superior study guide, is its ideal interpreter, as a celebrated scholar of Modernist and Postmodernist writing.

Contents

Part 1: Before The Waste Land. Eliot's Life and Works; Reading Eliot; The Music of Ideas

Part 2: “˜The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” “˜Prufrock” From “˜Prufrock” to The Waste Land

Part 3: The Waste Land: Preliminaries. The Role of Ezra Pound; The Dramatic Consciousness; The Mythic Consciousness; The Epigraph

Part 4: A Commentary on The Waste Land. The Burial of the Dead; A Game of Chess; The Fire Sermon; Death by Water; What the Thunder Said

Part 5: Bibliography

Part 6: Hyperlinked texts — a valuable compendium of the key works Eliot quotes or alludes to in The Waste Land.

author

Chris Ackerley took his BA and MA at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and his PhD at the University of Toronto. He has taught at the University of Otago, New Zealand, since 1976, and was Head of Department 2001““03. His speciality is annotation, particularly of the works of Malcolm Lowry and Samuel Beckett. His books include: A Companion to “˜Under the Volcano (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1984); Demented Particulars: The Annotated “Murphy” (1998; 2nd ed., rev. Tallahassee, FL: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2004); The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett (London: Faber & Faber, 2006) with S. E. Gontarski; and Obscure Locks, SimpleKeys: The Annotated “Watt” (Tallahassee, FL: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2005).