T. S. Eliot and Ideology

Setting out to demonstrate the effect of politics on the work of T. S. Eliot, T. S. Eliot and Ideology charts first of all the influence of French reactionary thinking on Eliot’s prose and poetry, and further argues that this political inheritance provided the intellectual framework he employed throughout his career. Asher’s concentration on the specifically ideological separates this book from previous works on Eliot, and sheds new light on Eliot’s celebrated mid-career conversion to Catholicism. What results is a re-estimation of Eliot’s view of literary history and literary theory, and new appraisals of several major poems and plays. Finally, the book discusses at length how Eliot’s ideology profoundly influenced the study of literature in the English-speaking world for several decades.

• First book to focus on influence of French reactionary thought on Eliot’s work • Argues a continuous, consistent Eliot, and relates pre- and post-conversion concerns, eschewing notion of rupture • Traces the influence of Eliot’s ideology on later literary though, particularly the New Critics

1. Historical background; 2. The French connection; 3. Orthodoxy and heresy; 4. Architect of a Christian order; 5. Visions and revisions; 6. Eliot and the new criticism; Conclusion; Notes; Index.

‘Elegant and perceptive.’ New York Review of Books

‘An astute, well-written account of a midwesterner’s strange ideological journey through the Old World.’ American Literature

‘A valuable contribution to the discussion of the politics of modernism and to the ongoing debate about Eliot’s political, religious, and social ideals.’ Choice