Waste Land Wanderings Classic Reprint

Excerpt from Waste-Land Wanderings Had some sturdy Dutch navigator wandered so far inland from the capes of the Delaware as to see the bold east shore of the river and mouth of Crosswicks Creek, he would doubtless have been charmed with so sweet a spot, and left a marvellous record of his journey. Alas! none came. Had the plucky Swedish engineer, who, in 1654, mapped the river from the capes to the falls, lost the main stream in some fog, and turned into Crosswicks Creek, what a wonderful account he would have given us of what he took to be the upper regions of the river valley. But there was no fog, and Lindstrom kept straight on until he reached the falls; and it has been recorded by a fellow-countryman of his, that "about the falls of Assinpink, and farther up the river, the land is rich, and there are a great many plantations on it. It does not produce much Indian-corn, but a great quantity of grape-vines, white, red, brown, and blue; the inhabitants want only to know how to press the grape in order to have a rich wine country. As to the interior, nothing is known about it, except that it is believed to be a continent: the Swedes have no intercourse with any of the savages but the black and white Mengwes - Iroquois - and these know nothing except that as far as they have gone into the interior the country is inhabited by other wild nations of various races." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1887.

First published in 1922, "The Waste Land" is T.S. Eliot's masterpiece, and is not only one of the key works of modernism but also one of the greatest poetic achievements of the twentieth century. A richly allusive pilgrimage of spiritual and psychological torment and redemption, Eliot's poem exerted a revolutionary influence on his contemporaries, summoning forth a rich new poetic language, breaking decisively with Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions. Kenneth Rexroth was not alone in calling Eliot "the representative poet of the time, for the same reason that Shakespeare and Pope were of theirs. He articulated the mind of an epoch in words that seemed its most natural expression." As influential as his verse, T.S. Eliot's criticism also exerted a transformative effect on twentieth-century letter, and this new edition of The Waste Land and Other Writings includes a selection of Eliot's most important essays. In her new Introduction, Mary Karr dispels some of the myths of the great poem's inaccessibility and sheds fresh light on the ways in which "The Waste Land" illuminates contemporary experience.

The first comprehensive study on the pattern of guilt and wandering in literature, this book examines the relationship between the two complex concepts as they appear in twentieth-century novels, positing its methodological premises on archetypal criticism and both close and distant reading, but also drawing on psychology, anthropology, mythology, and religion. This research deciphers a common paradigm and literary representation whose archetype within Western literature is found in the biblical figure of Cain, while presenting a critical framework valid for boundary-crossing comparative approaches. From Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, to Wolfgang Koeppen’s Death in Rome and Ōoka Shōhei’s Fires on the Plain, this book is not merely a thematic study, but an analysis of the literary phenomena that appear in those novels where the sense of guilt is controversially subjective, or so collective as to be perceived as universal, as is often the case with war and postwar literature. Di Gennaro goes beyond the analysis of explicit rewritings of the story of Cain, in order to uncover the monomyth through its rhetorical structures and mythical methods. The wasteland with no religion; the lost, abandoned garden; the classical and religiously-corrupted city; and the tropical, cannibalistic island at war are the respective settings of these narratives, where the issue is neither homelessness nor journeying, but, rather, the desperate and futile movement toward self-consciousness, or self-destruction. After the Second World War, much was silenced rather than left unsaid. This study retraces those silent cries over history through the powerful literary marks of myths.

This collection asks how we are to address the nuclear question in a post-Cold War world. Rather than a temporary fad, Nuclear Criticism perpetually re-surfaces in theoretical circles. Given the recent events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, the ripple of anti-nuclear sentiment the event created, as well as the discursive maneuvers that took place in the aftermath, we might pause to reflect upon Nuclear Criticism and its place in contemporary scholarship (and society at-large). Scholars who were active in earlier expressions of Nuclear Criticism converse with emergent scholars likewise striving to negotiate the field moving forward. This volume revolves around these dialogic moments of agreement and departure; refusing the silence of complacency, the authors renew this conversation while taking it in exciting new directions. As political paradigms shift and awareness of nuclear issues manifests in alternative forms, the collected essays establish groundwork for future generations caught in a perpetual struggle with legacies of the nuclear.