This monumental eight-volume edition of modern literature brings together, for the first time in print, all of the vastly influential prose writings of Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot, the poet and dramatist whose theories and criticism shaped twentieth-century thought and literature around the world.
This complete collection provides access to over 6,000 pages of Eliot's nonfiction prose writings on literature, philosophy, religion, cultural theory, world politics, and other topics of urgent and enduring import. It includes all of the essays that he collected in his lifetime, but also more than 1,000 uncollected, unrecorded, or unpublished items, many of which were missing or inaccessible for decades. From the formative "Interpretation of Primitive Ritual" (1913), written in graduate school at Harvard, to the summative "To Criticize the Critic" (1961), the Complete Prose offers readers full access to the immense scope and variety of Eliot's works in their biographical, historical, and cultural context.
The individual volumes have received the highest praise from prominent scholars: volume II won the Modernist Studies Association's 2015 Book Prize for an Edition, Anthology, or Essay Collection, while volumes V and VI were jointly awarded the 2017 Prize for a Scholarly Edition by the Modern Language Association. They display "uniform excellence," wrote the Awards Committee: "Their thorough textual introductions, sophisticated annotations merging intelligent commentary with brevity and completeness, make the volumes a pleasure to read... and enlarge our understanding of Eliot as the public intellectual at work."
Together with recent editions of the Poems, the eight volumes of Letters, and the sensational opening in 2020 of Eliot's letters to Emily Hale, the Complete Prose brings us to the threshold of a new age for the study of Eliot and the modernist writers of his day.
Project MUSE is home to the fully searchable online edition of the Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot.
About the Author
Ronald Schuchard, the Goodrich C. White Professor of English Emeritus at Emory University, is the author of the award-winning Eliot's Dark Angel (1999) and The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts (2008). The editor of Eliot's Clark and Turnbull lectures, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (1993), he is the coeditor with John Kelly of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume 3 (1994), Volume 4 (2005)-which was the winner of the MLA's Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters-and Volume 5 (2018).
A former Guggenheim fellow and founder-director of the T. S. Eliot International Summer School (2009-2013, 2017-2018), Schuchard is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Volume coeditors: Jewel Spears Brooker (I, VIII), Anthony Cuda (II), Frances Dickey (III), Jennifer Formichelli (III), Jason Harding (IV), Jayme Stayer (V), David E. Chinitz (VI), Iman Javadi (V, VII)
Industry Reviews
We are in for an incomparable feast. * Weekly Standard * One of the more significant reading experiences of my life . . . a major recognition, after fifty years, of [Eliot's] contribution. * Hudson Review * If your interest lies in the English and American poetry of the first half of the twentieth century, or with the history of English literature, these are volumes you will want to consult again and again. * Twentieth Century Literature * With such a brilliant team of scholars leading the way, The Complete Prose will offer . . . one of the greatest resources of its kind, combining each piece in Eliot's vast sixty-year archive with expertly detailed contextualization. * Journal of Modern Literature * The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition is an enormous boon to scholars. Present and future generations will owe great debts to [the editors] for their shrewdness, tenacity, and sheer, generous scholarship. * Time Present * Will set in motion a golden era of Eliot scholarship. * Chronicle of Higher Education *
