Reading The Waste Land from the bottom up
By: Allyson Booth
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; Springer
Published: 2015
Place of publication: New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 273
ISBN-13: 9781137488381
Description: Reading the Waste Land from the Bottom Up is a guidebook to the footnotes of T. S. Eliot's notoriously allusive poem. While information on The Waste Land sources can be daunting when heaped at the bottom of the page in an anthology, using the notes as starting points can open up the poem in unexpected ways. This book provides a summary of each source and a discussion aimed at reconfiguring our sense of the poem. Organized according to Eliot's line numbers, chapters are freestanding and can be read in any order. The book, which is designed to be both useful to academics and accessible to undergraduates, gives readers a working knowledge of the poem's footnotes and suggests that beginning with its sources - far from making The Waste Land intractable - actually offers a productive, surprisingly understandable approach to it. -- from back cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 255-261) and index.