T. S. Eliot and the Mother Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature Series
Auteur : Geary Matthew
The first full-length study on T. S. Eliot and the mother, this book responds to a shortfall in understanding the true importance of Eliot?s poet-mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, to his life and works. In doing so, it radically rethinks Eliot?s ambivalence towards women. In a context of mother?son ambivalence (simultaneous feelings of love and hate), it shows how his search for belief and love converged with a developing maternal poetics. Importantly, the chapters combine standard literary critical methods and extensive archival research with innovative feminist, maternal and psychoanalytic theorisations of mother?child relationships, such as those developed by Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Jessica Benjamin, Jan Campbell and Rozsika Parker. These maternal thinkers emphasise the vital importance and benefit of recognising the pre-Oedipal mother and maternal subjectivity, contrary to traditional, repressive Oedipal models of masculinity. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the chapters look at Eliot?s changing representations and articulations of the mother/ mother?child relationship from his very earliest writings through to the later plays. Focus is given to decisive mid-career works: Ash-Wednesday (1930), ?Marina? (1930), ?Coriolan? (1931?32) and The Family Reunion (1939), as well as to canonical works The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). Notably, the study draws heavily on the wide range of Eliot materials now available, including the new editions of the complete poems, the complete prose and the volumes of letters, which are transforming our perception of the poet and challenging critical attitudes. The book also gives unprecedented attention to Charlotte Eliot?s life and writings and brings her individual female experience and subjectivity to the fore. Significantly, it establishes Charlotte?s death in 1929 as a decisive juncture, marking both Eliot?s New Life and the apotheosis of the feminine symbolised in Ash-Wednesday. Central to this proposition is Geary?s new formulation for recognising and examining a maternal poetics, which also compels a new concept of maternal allegory as a modern mode of literary epiphany. T. S. Eliot and the Mother reveals the role of the mother and the dynamics of mother?son ambivalence to be far more complicated, enduring, changeable and essential to Eliot?s personal, religious and poetic development than previously acknowledged.
Introduction
1 ‘There Will be Time to Murder and Create’:
Creative/Destructive Ambivalence in T. S. Eliot’s Early Poetry
2 Maternal Allegory:
Death and the Mother, Faith and Revelation in Ash-Wednesday
3 Ash-Wednesday: A Poetics of the Maternal Body
4 Recognition in ‘Marina’ and ‘Coriolan’:
Sea-Changes in Eliot’s Thinking on the Maternal
5 ‘Everything Has Always Been Referred Back to Mother’:
The Melodramatic Staging of Ambivalence in The Family Reunion
Conclusion: T. S. Eliot’s Stabat Mater
Matthew Geary is an independent scholar in English Literature, Modernism, Psychoanalysis, Feminist Philosophy, Critical Theory, and Maternal Studies.
Date de parution : 05-2023
15.2x22.9 cm
Date de parution : 05-2021
15.2x22.9 cm
Thème de T. S. Eliot and the Mother :
Mots-clés :
Young Man; Charlotte Eliot; Garboard Strake; Poetry; Maternal Form; American Poetry; La Figlia Che Piange; Modern American Poetry; Maternal Feminine; Modernism; Maternal Body; Feminism; Charlotte’s Death; Motherhood; Maternal Ambivalence; mothering; Eliot’s Works; Oedipus; Dry Salvages; love; Vita Nuova; maternal love; Dante’s Vita Nuova; Ash-Wednesday; Eliot’s Early Poems; Marina; Christ Child; Coriolan; Eliot’s Life; The Family Reunion; Part Iii; prose; Mother Son Relationship; American prose; Eliot’s Early Poetry; religion; Imaginary Father; spirituality; Dante’s Allegory; relationships; La Figlia; Freud; Melodramatic Passions; masculinity; Recognition Scene; sexuality; German Tragic Drama; desire; Ancient Passion; feminine; identity; attitudes towards women; marriage; activism; social reform; mother-son ambivalence; psychoanalytic; The Origin of German Tragic Drama; psychoanalysis; maternal studies; allegory studies; patriarchy; modernist masculinities; postmodern agenda; mandarins; Love Song of St; Sebastian; Love Song of J; Alfred Prufrock; Hysteria; The Waste Land; Tradition and the Individual Talent; Hamlet and his Problems; Dante; The Enigma of the Lady; The 1928 Typescript; Death; Walter Benjamin; Flowers and the Garden; Juvenilia; Colour; The Face; Oedipal models; Eliot's poet-mother; Poetic development; Maternal poetics