This chapter discusses the relationship of the imagination to Christian eschatology. It gives an account of the function of eschatological imagery in the Bible, discusses the changing ways in which art and literature have engaged Christian eschatology, and concludes with an account of a distinctly eschatological imagination.

This chapter moves from the macro-level of social and narrative imagination to the micro-level of speaking and seeing. It continues to consider the interplay of inheritance and originality in these practices: the constitutive underdetermination or equivocity of what we see and say. The chapter illuminates the ways in which even at the smallest levels, we construct the world imaginatively. It then begins to discuss how art and poetry loosen the grasp of automated perception and do not impose an alternative vision but rather grant a double vision of our lives, allowing us to see it from new perspectives or in new ways. The chapter concludes with a consideration of liturgical and biblical renewals of perception.

This chapter approaches the problem of the poem's audience vis-à-vis the relational process of reading whereby one poem opens windows onto another, either through intertextual references and allusions or through the reader's own cognitive connections. The chapter expands on this relational ontology of poems to argue that in the act of reading there is no single poem; instead, a universal named “poetry” is extracted from the particularity of the so-called “single” poem. The chapter focuses on the poet-reader as a specific category of audience and, in order to read the transnational travel of poems, it considers the reception of T. S. Eliot in the works of Rabindranath Tagore and of the generation of Bengali poets who, after Tagore, both translate Eliot and echo him in their own poems. If Tagore is dissident in his use of Eliot's poetry as a counter-frame, the younger Samar Sen records a supportive intertextual presence of Eliot, while Bishnu Dey's translation of Eliot foregrounds a self-reflexivity of the poem that he imports into Eliot's text. These close readings affirm the chapter's central critique of the autonomous single poem in the pluralistic reading process.

This chapter focuses on some specific features of the historical classic, offering a series of reflections to expand a debate on this complex topic. Based on some examples of the Western historiographical tradition, I discuss to what extent historians should engage the concept of the classic, as has been done for literary and artworks. I will argue that it is possible to identify a category of the classic text in historical writing. Because of their narrative condition, historical texts share some of the features assigned to literary texts such as durability, timelessness, universal meaningfulness, resistance to historical criticism, susceptibility to multiple interpretations, and ability to function as models. Yet, since historical texts do not construct imaginary worlds but try to achieve some realities external to the text, they also have to attain some specific features according to this referential content, such as the surplus of meaning, historical use of metaphors, effect of contemporaneity, and a certain appropriation of ‘literariness’.

Economic Consequences enjoyed an outright favourable reception in Turkey. This chapter illuminates the circumstances that made this possible. Of the Carthaginian peace-imposing treaties of the Paris Conference (1919), only the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) concerning the Ottoman Empire was annulled after a battleground victory (1922), and replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). An officer and a diplomat, Ali Fethi (Okyar), soon to become prime minister of Turkey, was a prisoner of war in Malta when he heard of Keynes’s book, acquired a copy, and translated it in 1920. Because the national leaders were anxious to know what awaited them in the peace talks, given the huge Ottoman debt they inherited, impending war reparations, and the discriminatory treatment they suspected, upon Ali Fethi’s release and return, the translation was published in 1922 by the official press in Ankara. It helped prepare the Turkish delegation to the Lausanne conference. This case provides us with an early example of Economic Consequences as a policy instrument in favour of a new international integration serviceable to peace and reconstruction in the face of an international conflict.

The making new that is generally seen as definitive of modernist practice covers a range of different ambitions and dispositions. The same mindset is also evident in literary-modernist treatments of animals, despite claims that the "modernist animal" does not really exist. This chapter examines a range of modernist works that advance their own singular zoopoetic insights, through two principal approaches to modernist animal studies. The first, characterized by "invention," comprises the fantastic beasts of Herman Melville (the White Whale), W. B. Yeats (mythological, eschatological, and mechanical creatures), and Djuna Barnes (human-animal becomings), which turn on the notion of hybridity and its multivalent effects. The second, the domestic, is centered on cats and dogs in the works of Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway, Flush), T. S. Eliot (“Prufrock,” Old Possum’s), and James Joyce (Ulysses). Yet these domestic animals are anything but commonplace or pedestrian, in that they reveal the otherness at the heart of companion species. Literary-modernist animals are thus legion, and it is in the dialectic between the fantastic and the domestic that their distinctive particularities can best be understood.

This essay begins with a close reading of Tracy’s recent programmatic formulations concerning: (1) the ‘strong fragments’ of culture that ‘shatter, fragment, negate any closed totality system’; and (2) those ‘most powerful fragments’ that ‘show themselves not as substances but as events and positively open to liminal Infinity’. If some cultural fragments are mere ‘period pieces’ without enduring truth or transformative power, and others are dangerously nostalgic, these fragments, Chase suggests, can act strongly when collaged into some ‘new form of witness against any false whole or claim to completeness’. T. S Eliot’s The Waste Land is an ambiguous example here. The pinnacle of the fragment for Tracy, however, is the ‘frag-event’ that opens towards the creative liminality of an invisible Infinity. ‘Marxist-Kabbalist’ Walter Benjamin is ‘the projective force’ behind Tracy’s forays into the fragment. The essay proposes the role of assemblage or collage for both fragmenting fragments and the Tracyean frag-event, stressing the role of edges and unexpected connections, and concluding by wondering how far Christian theology is really ready to think in such a manner of collage.

The Introduction opens with a close reading of information proliferation and human–machine interfaces in James Joyce’s Ulysses to establish these themes as central to the book’s exploration of the emergent early-twentieth-century phenomenon Love labels “cybernetic thinking.” She traces biographical and intellectual connections between T. S. Eliot and Norbert Wiener (the “father of cybernetics”), provides an overview of the field of cybernetics and its definitional challenges, and proposes that a reconsideration of cybernetics’s cultural lineage – as evident in experimental modernist texts – will contribute a valuable new dimension to our understanding of both modernism and cybernetics. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s notion of the “cybernetic fold” is redeployed to describe the rich openness to data-processing-possibility that emerges during these decades, when high-speed computing is imaginable but not yet technologically realized. After contextualizing the project within existing media- and modernist-studies conversations, the Introduction culminates with a close reading of Wiener’s cybernetic approach to information that links his perspective on technical innovation to modernist aesthetics.

The book begins with the mouth itself, demonstrating why the persistently undertheorized “lower sense” of taste is such a potent site for thinking about queer pleasure. Modernist writers’ interest in taste signals a shift in bodily figuration at the turn of the twentieth century. If, as Gail Turley Houston argues, the stomach often served as “the synecdoche of the Victorian body politic,” modernist writers turned to the mouth, substituting the embodied pleasure of taste for the cogitative metaphor of digestion. Rather than a metaphor for gradual understanding, queer modernists required a way of thinking past understanding, emphasizing immediacy, embodiment, and illegible forms of pleasure. As “gay” and “lesbian” subjects were becoming legible, modernists sought new ways to talk about queer subjectivity that weren’t delimited by these newly normative identities. As demonstrated through readings of early poems by H. D. and T. S. Eliot, this turn to the mouth both figured and enacted a queering of genre, as the depiction of new forms of pleasure enabled new forms of literary pleasure.

A summary of critical responses to Collins’s fiction through the twentieth century as initiated by T. S. Eliot’s essay in the Times Literary Supplement

E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, T. E. Hulme, and T. S. Eliot all engaged in their critical and creative works with Edwardian liberalism: with the reformist policies of the Liberal Party in England (which came to power in 1905), with the New Liberal ideas on which these policies were based, but also and more broadly with the much older philosophical and political outlook of liberalism. The works and theories of these early modernists were written in direct response to liberal ideas old and new, with even anti-liberal ‘classical’ modernists such as Hulme and Eliot embracing fundamental liberal values (while of course rejecting many others). A consideration of Forster’s short story ‘The Other Side of the Hedge’ (1904), Ford’s 1912 poem ‘Süssmund’s Address to an Unknown God’, Hulme’s essays in The Commentator (1911–12), and Eliot’s programmatic essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) shows how, much as with many other contradictory facets of literary modernism, the relationship of modernism to liberalism was close, uneasy, and foundational.

The Epilogue moves forward to consider briefly selected poems from the twentieth century by T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and especially Louise Glück, who in her Nobel prize acceptance speech in December 2020 invoked an earlier tradition of poems that seem to invite the reader into secret conversations. These conversations are not, in fact, so secret, as Conversing in Verse has argued. The poems Glück cites (by Blake, Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot) include voices conversing under difficult conditions – as do her own poems, particularly in two collections, The Wild Iris and Meadowlands. There, as in the poetry that has been the subject of this study, misunderstandings and failed encounters are as frequent as successful ones. Handled with Glück’s ironic, witty self-awareness, they too are desperate conversations – with other people, with an impatient God, or with the nonhuman phenomena of the world. Poetry is after all sociable; it continues, against all odds, to converse.

The founding fathers of English literature, Chaucer and Shakespeare, bequeathed a range of possible attitudes to Jews and Judaism. These can be found in the ambivalent figure of “the Jew” – malign and benign, medieval and modern – in much 19th- and 20th-century English literature, from the romantic poets to imperial writers, and from realist novelists to modernist writers of all kinds. The essay contextualizes these changing attitudes and ends with Graham Greene, George Orwell, and Margaret Drabble.

A study of Elliott Carter’s song cycles and other text settings from the period 1998-2011, with close readings of both poetry and music. Included are individual analytical essays on Tempo e tempi (poetry by Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Giuseppe Ungaretti), Of Rewaking (poems by William Carlos Williams), In the Distances of Sleep (poems by Wallace Stevens), Mad Regales (poems by John Ashbery), “La Musique” (poem by Charles Baudelaire), On Conversing with Paradise (texts from Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos), Poems of Louis Zukofsky, What Are Years (poems by Marianne Moore), A Sunbeam’s Architecture (poems by e e cummings), Three Explorations (poems by T. S. Eliot), The American Sublime (poems by Wallace Stevens).

One traditional solution to the problem of how modernist poetry began is to tell the story of a transition between Yeats’s early masterpieces and Eliot’s The Waste Land. This is a story which usually centres upon the rise of free verse and a growing urgency to represent the modern world. More recently, critics have looked to tell stories about neglected poets, in which less obviously experimental works are found nevertheless to represent that same modern world. Both approaches involve tracing continuities and ruptures, often with reference to the unprecedented ruptures and rapid developments which characterised life in Britain in the first two decades of the century. This chapter shifts the emphasis from deciding how poetry somehow made a miraculous leap from the fin de siècle to high modernism, to exploring how the poetic forms of diverse poets working at this time refract the very conception and experience of transition, and especially the experience of transition when no certain beginning or end is in sight. The aim here is thus to resist the logic of literary history’s usual narratives, and to show that the poems of this period do so too at the level of poetic technique.

This chapter charts the transition, in British literature of the early twentieth century, from the Decadence associated with Wilde and his generation to the modernism associated with Eliot and his generation. If criticism has readily acknowledged that London, as the locus of an emergent modernist sensibility, was bound up in geographically extended networks of transatlantic and European literary practice, the story of historical transition from Decadence to modernism has been less often told. With particular reference to the poetries of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, the chapter shows how the aesthetics of Decadence were reconfigured and repurposed by modernist writers, before turning in a brief coda to the counter-example of W. B. Yeats, for whom questions of Decadence and modernism were bound up with the national politics of a changing Ireland.

James Joyce and T. S. Eliot advanced a ‘double consciousness’ in their approach to myth that pervades Tony Harrison’s Metamorpheus(2000) and Sandeep Parmar’s Eidolon(2015). This double consciousness is not unique to modernism, but it intensifies in early twentieth-century literature, inscribing modernists’ desire to explore what Michael Bell describes as ‘the problematics of history under the sign of myth’. The mythic counterpointing that underpins Harrison’s work indicates that his modernist influences have been neglected by critics and poets such as Simon Armitage, eager to position his poetry as eschewing unnecessary complexity. However, whereas Metamorpheus and Eidolon would both be symptomatic of metamodernist literature in Andre Furlani’s understanding of the term, it is only in Eidolon that the legacies of ‘fractured’ writing allow for an enigmatical account of Helen, one of the most elusive figures in Greek myth.

How Norman Mailer enters the discussion of Modernism may be as opaque as the discussion of Modernism itself. Several lines of approach, however, may be useful: First, which traditions did Mailer gravitate towards; second, how did Mailer define himself as an artist; third, what were the central elements of his worldview and poetics; and fourth, what questions of form and style did his work attempt to explore? This chapter situates Mailer’s work within the literary and historical context of the Modernist movement by focusing on his use of persona, his worldview, and the thematic content of his work.

This chapter reads The Golden Bowl and The Waste Land as semaphores for the felt weakening of twentieth-century British and European ascendancy. James’s exquisitely managed novel and Eliot’s encyclopedic poem are not just documents of disintegration, but new totalizations on new architectonic principles. In their respective treatments of shattering, salvage and re-composition, they point to new world orders still only partially emerging into view during the decades immediately after World War I. American wealth and the transfer of art from Europe to America is The Golden Bowl’s subject; The Waste Land is concerned with the collapse of European culture and coherence. However, as James became 'the master' of the English novel and Eliot 'the Pope of Russell Square' American attempts to manage what Europe could no longer do became as evident in cultural as in political fields. After World War II, the United States would proudly reclaim these émigré writers and establish new 'Great Books' and “World Literature' courses to reflect its ambitions as the Cold War era’s major superpower.