<h4>Explores the relation between humility and humiliation in the works of T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett</h4>

<ul><li>Offers the first book-length comparative study of T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett</li>
<li>Develops a literary theory of humility and humiliation – concepts whose definitions have largely been determined by philosophy and theology</li>
<li>Explores the relation between negative affect, ethics and aesthetics</li></ul>

<p>Humility and humiliation have an awkward, often unacknowledged intimacy. Humility may be a queenly, cardinal or monkish virtue, while humiliation points to an affective state at the extreme end of shame. Yet a shared etymology links the words to lowliness and, further down, to the earth. As this study suggests, like the terms in question, T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett share an imperfect likeness. Between them is a common interest in states of abjection, shame and suffering – and possible responses to such states. Tracing the relation between negative affect, ethics, and aesthetics, <i>Eliot and Beckett’s Low Modernism</i> demonstrates how these two major modernists recuperate the affinity between humility and humiliation – concepts whose definitions have largely been determined by philosophy and theology.</p>

The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual is the leading venue for the critical reassessment of Eliot’s life and work in light of the ongoing publication of his letters, critical volumes of his complete prose, the new edition of his complete poems, and the forthcoming critical edition of his plays. All critical approaches are welcome, as are essays pertaining to any aspect of Eliot’s work as a poet, critic, playwright, or editor. John D. Morgenstern, General Editor Editorial Advisory Board: Ronald Bush, University of Oxford David E. Chinitz, Loyola University Chicago Anthony Cuda, University of North Carolina–Greensboro Robert Crawford, University of St Andrews Frances Dickey, University of Missouri John Haffenden, University of Sheffield Benjamin G. Lockerd, Grand Valley State University Gail McDonald, Goldsmiths, University of London Gabrielle McIntire, Queen’s University Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia Christopher Ricks, Boston University Ronald Schuchard, Emory University Vincent Sherry, Washington University at St. Louis

The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature is the first authoritative and definitive edited collection on absurdist literature. As a field-defining volume, the editor and the contributors are world leaders in this ever-exciting genre that includes some of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century, including Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Albert Camus. Ever puzzling and always refusing to be pinned down, this book does not attempt to define absurdist literature, but attempts to examine its major and minor players. As such, the field is indirectly defined by examining its constituent writers. Not only investigating the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd,” this volume wades deeply into absurdist fiction and absurdist poetry, expanding much of our previous sense of what constitutes absurdist literature. Furthermore, long overdue, approximately one-third of the book is devoted to marginalized writers: black, Latin/x, female, LGBTQ+, and non-Western voices.

This book explores the importance of Lacan’s role as an irritant within psychoanalysis, and how Freud and Lacan saw that as key to ensuring that psychoanalysis remained fresh and vital rather than becoming obsolescent. Drawing on Freud’s thinking as well as Lacan’s, Rabate examines how Lacan’s unwillingness to allow psychoanalytic thinking to become stale or pigeonholed into one part of life was key in his thinking. By constantly returning to psychoanalytic ideas in new and evolving ways, Lacan kept psychoanalysis moving and changing, much as Socrates did for philosophical thinking in classical Athens. This ‘gadfly’ or irritant role gave him free reign to explore all aspects of psychoanalytic thinking and treatment, and how it can permeate all aspects of life, both in the consulting room and beyond. Drawing on a deep understanding of Lacan’s work as well as Freud’s, this book is key reading for all those seeking to understand why Lacan’s work remains so important and so challenging for contemporary psychoanalysis.

Modernist Life Histories explores how new models of embryonic development helped inspire new kinds of coming-of-age plots during the first half of the twentieth century.

Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath explores Beckett's literary responses to the political maelstroms of his formative and middle years: the Irish civil war and the crisis of commitment in 1930s Europe, the rise of fascism and the atrocities of World War II. Archive yields a Beckett who monitored propaganda in speeches and newspapers, and whose creative work engages with specific political strategies, rhetoric, and events. Finally, Beckett's political aesthetic sharpens into focus. Deep within form, Beckett models ominous historical developments as surely as he satirizes artistic and philosophical interpretations that overlook them. He burdens aesthetic production with guilt: imagination and language, theater and narrative, all parallel political techniques. Beckett comically embodies conservative religious and political doctrines; he plays Irish colonial history against contemporary European horrors; he examines aesthetic complicity in effecting atrocity and covering it up. This book offers insightful, original, and vivid readings of Beckett's work up to Three Novels and Endgame.

This book rethinks the influence that early medieval studies and Grail narratives had on modernist literature. Through examining several canonical works, from Henry James' The Golden Bowl to Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Ullyot argues that these texts serve as a continuation of the Grail legend inspired by medieval scholarship.

Being Poland offers a unique analysis of the cultural developments that took place in Poland after World War One, a period marked by Poland's return to independence. Conceived to address the lack of critical scholarship on Poland's cultural restoration, Being Poland illuminates the continuities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Poland's modern and contemporary cultural practices, and challenges the narrative typically prescribed to Polish literature and film. Reflecting the radical changes, rifts, and restorations that swept through Poland in this period, Polish literature and film reveal a multitude of perspectives. Addressing romantic perceptions of the Polish immigrant, the politics of post-war cinema, poetry, and mass media, Being Poland is a comprehensive reference work written with the intention of exposing an international audience to the explosion of Polish literature and film that emerged in the twentieth century.

A collection of essays which discuss how different cultures deal with environmental issues.

Granular Modernism understands the way that some modernist texts put themselves together as a way of pulling themselves apart. In this volume, Beci Carver offers a new way of reading Modernist texts, by drawing attention to the anomalies that make them difficult to summarise or simplify. Carver proposes that rather than trying to find the shapes of narrative or argument in their writing, the 'Granular Modernists'- - namely, Joseph Conrad, William Gerhardie, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and Samuel Beckett -- experiment in certain of their works in finding the shapelessness of a moment in history that increasingly confidently called itself 'modern', which was to call itself shapeless. The project of modernism in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, was to find a story to tell about an era full of beginnings. The project of 'Granular Modernism' was to find a way of turning the inchoateness of the modern moment into art. Granular Modernism takes from the Naturalist movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth century its attentiveness to the process of mundane experiences like eating or waiting. But where Naturalism sets out to offer a complete picture of a way of life, Granular Modernism's eating and waiting fail to amount to anything more; to paraphrase Evelyn Waugh: 'The most they can hope for is a cumulative futility.' Frank Norris once described one of Stephen Crane's narrators as: 'a locust in a grain elevator attempting to empty the silo by carrying off one grain at a time.' Norris is being dismissive. But his image of pointless, meticulous, indefinite manoeuvre potentially defines the ambition of the Granular Modernists.