New Historicism: The Wasteland
New Historicism: T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”
T.S. Eliot’s highly influential 433-line modernist poem is perhaps the most famous and most written-about long poem of the twentieth-century. Eliot’s composition brings forth a reader to understand the work through its historical context and to understand cultural and intellectual history through this piece of literature, which documents the new discipline of the history of ideas. In other words, The Waste Land is subject to New Historicism to further understand the text of the poem and its relevance to history.
T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land, was published in October of 1922. The 1920’s and 1930’s are often known as the interwar period. The decades were profoundly shaped by the dislocations of World War I and then the mounting crisis that led to World War II. These were decades of considerable dislocation in the West. Revolutionary regimes in several societies provided another source of change. New, authoritarian political systems were another response to crisis, particularly after the Great Depression, in several parts of the world. All of this occurred even as resistance to European imperialism was mounting (Davies 938). In addition, the 1920’s was marked by major patterns. One of the first major patterns, Western Europe recovered from World War I incompletely, particularly in economics and politics. Cultural creativity was important, and several social developments marked real innovation. But political and economic structures and European diplomacy as well, rested on shaky foundations.
World War I quickly shattered the confidence many Europeans had maintained around the turn of the twentieth-century. Although the ultimate effects of World War I involved Europe’s world position, the war also brought tremendous dislocation within Europe. Though some of the damage was quickly repaired, much of the damage persisted for the subsequent two decades. The key battlegrounds for four bloody years had
T.S. Eliot’s highly influential 433-line modernist poem is perhaps the most famous and most written-about long poem of the twentieth-century. Eliot’s composition brings forth a reader to understand the work through its historical context and to understand cultural and intellectual history through this piece of literature, which documents the new discipline of the history of ideas. In other words, The Waste Land is subject to New Historicism to further understand the text of the poem and its relevance to history.
T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land, was published in October of 1922. The 1920’s and 1930’s are often known as the interwar period. The decades were profoundly shaped by the dislocations of World War I and then the mounting crisis that led to World War II. These were decades of considerable dislocation in the West. Revolutionary regimes in several societies provided another source of change. New, authoritarian political systems were another response to crisis, particularly after the Great Depression, in several parts of the world. All of this occurred even as resistance to European imperialism was mounting (Davies 938). In addition, the 1920’s was marked by major patterns. One of the first major patterns, Western Europe recovered from World War I incompletely, particularly in economics and politics. Cultural creativity was important, and several social developments marked real innovation. But political and economic structures and European diplomacy as well, rested on shaky foundations.
World War I quickly shattered the confidence many Europeans had maintained around the turn of the twentieth-century. Although the ultimate effects of World War I involved Europe’s world position, the war also brought tremendous dislocation within Europe. Though some of the damage was quickly repaired, much of the damage persisted for the subsequent two decades. The key battlegrounds for four bloody years had
Cited: Barzun, Jacques. From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. New York City: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. Davies, Norman. Europe, A History: A Panorama of Europe, East and West, From the Ice Age to The Cold War, from The Urals to Gibraltar. New York City: First HarperPerennial, 1998. Eliot, T.S.. The Waste Land. In A Norton Critical Edition, Michael North, ed. New York City: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001. Rich, Norman. “The Habsburg Empire, 1790-1918.” Political Science Quarterly 87(1972): 137-138 Roberts, J.M.. The New History of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.