T. S. Eliot - The Waste Land (Readers' Guides to Essential Criticism) Soft cover - 1999

T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922) is widely recognised as a central text of modernism and is often described as the most important poem of the 20th century. Although its demanding experimentalism has led to condemnation and praise in equal measure, it has fundamentally changed the ways in which poetry is written and read. It is crucial to an understanding of modern culture, a continual challenge to readers to reassess how they think about the world.

In this Readers' Guide, Nick Selby brings together some of the most important critical writings about The Waste Land and provides a clear discussion of their place within the development of critical theory from modernism to postmodernism. The Guide begins with early reviews and discussions from the 1920s and 30s, considered alongside Eliot's own critical essays, showing how he set the critical terms by which his poem has been read. Moving on to examine the ways in which the poem became accepted as a literary classic, the Guide then looks at 'New Critical' and 'Formalist' readings. The final chapters examine radical reassessments of the poem that have taken place in recent criticism, drawing upon 'deconstructive' readings that challenge The Waste Land's assumed cultural power by looking at it in the light of Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytical and cultural materialist reading practices.