The centenary of Eliot's birth in 1988 provided the salutary occasion for a fresh look at his life and work and a reassessment in light of issues raised by the various critical movements - the new historicism, feminism, reader-reception theory - that have succeeded the New Criticism, loosely subsumable under the rubric post-structuralist. The essays assembled here vary in approach, but they share a commitment to the discipline of history and an awareness that history can function as critique as well as celebration. Several contributors take issue with Eliot's self-presentation and include documents Eliot chose not to emphasise. Others address topics including the business of producing culture in twentieth-century writing, the impact of self-professed masculinist poetry on women readers and modernism's social vouchers.

The centenary of Eliot's birth in 1988 provided the salutary occasion to go back to his life and work, to reassess him in the light of issues raised by various critical movements--the new historicism, feminism, reader-reception theory--that have come to the fore since the New Criticism poststructuralist. This sort of reassessment is the lively and pertinent idea behind Ronald Bush's collection of new essays on Eliot. The essays assembled vary in approach, but share a commitment to the discipline of history, and an awareness that history can function as critique as well as celebration. Many of the essays take issue with Eliot's self-presentation and include documents Eliot chose not to emphasize. Some press the limits of literary and intellectual history to enter areas of cultural practice, stressing the institutions of publishing and the social processes of gender formation. Other essays address issues such as the direction of twentieth-century writing, the impact of self-professed masculinist poetry on women readers, and whether modernism's social values were really consistently inimical to liberal visions of the future.

Examining the emergence of modernism from the fin-de-siecle primitivist project this volume shows how ethnographic materials shaped a variety of high and low discourses (ethnology, social theory, gender construction, classical scholarship, as well as travel photography) at the turn of the century. Illustrated with 98 photographs and drawings.

This volume reconsiders primitivism and modernism, emphasizing an earlier chronology than has been conventionally accepted and showing how ethnographic materials shaped a variety of high and low discourses (ethnology, social theory, gender construction, and classical scholarship, as well as travel photography) at the turn of the century. Acknowledging the complexities, political and otherwise, of the primitivist project, the sixteen essays in this book suggest that primitivism has always been involved contested ideological forces and that the process seems to have generated a set of responses inseparable from what we have come to call modernism.