Eliot, Joyce and Company

Informed by a writer's view of how a writer works, this perceptive study illuminates the careers of two major figures of 20th-century literature, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. Sultan engages in a unique form of historical criticism, blending a literary history of Modernism with a richly intimate knowledge of its key works--"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," The Waste Land, and Ulysses--and confronting questions of literary theory implicit in the modernist period. In doing so, he examines the antecedents of Modernism, focusing on three major influences--Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Dostoyevsky--and then traces the influence of Eliot and Joyce on their contemporaries, including Virginia Woolf and Wallace Stevens. Concluding with an appraisal of Eliot's and Joyce's impact on the readers and writers of today, Eliot, Joyce and Company sheds considerable light on the careers of these writers, on their works, and on the history of Modernism.