T.S. Eliot – An Author for All Seasons
Publisher: Contemporary Literature Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Bucharest, Romania, http://editura.mttlc.ro/vianu_eliot.html
Format: E-book
Number of pages: 207
ISBN-13: 9786069216750
Description: There is no shortage of books about T.S.Eliot, but this online reissue of Lidia Vianu’s comprehensive study is particularly welcome. It engages with the full range of Eliot’s work and, making good use of anecdotal accounts from other writers’ memoirs, with his complex, contradictory personality. The poems, plays and essays are closely examined with academic rigour but what, for me, makes Lidia Vianu a stimulating guide is the individual character of her response. While scholarly and informed, she is also an engagingly intuitive and independent reader, characterising Eliot’s methods with her own arrestingly metaphorical turns of phrase. At one point she refers to a ‘lotus land of enticing complications’ – nicely suggesting the adventurous spirit with which she immerses herself in the poet’s world and explores its challenging landscape.

    John Mole
    May 2010
Table of contents: title: CONTENTS; title: I. T.S. Eliot and the Dignity of Culture; title: II. An Age of Imprecision (Order Denied); title: III. My Days and Ways (Eliot and His Time, Eliot on; title: His Time); title: IV. POETRY,; title: 1. Coherence in Fragmentariness; title: 2. Misreadings of Eliot’s Over- and Under-; title: State¬ments (Faltering between Believing; title: and Wishful Thinking); title: 3. The Hollow Poems: Eliot Explicit; title: 4. Humour Descending; title: 5. Eliot in Hiding (Prying into What Was Not; title: Meant to Be Published); title: V. LITERARY CRITICISM,; title: 1. Visions and Revisions: A Critical Age for Criticism?; title: 2. Word of No Speech: Eliot and His Words; title: 3. The Quicksands of Criticism: Issues and Approaches; title: 4. Workshop Criticism: Towards a History of English; title: Literature; title: VI. DRAMA,; title: Behind the Scenes (The Quest and Question Plays); title: VII. Eliot Mis à Nu (The Soothing Quartets); title: Eliot’s major works