The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose

Eliot's own notes to his masterpiece were described by Eliot himself, as Rainey here relates, as padding that took on a life of its own as the controversies surrounding the poem took off in the '20s. That's just one of the tidbits in this terrific edition of a modernist work that retains its power to shock, as well as a high degree of allusive difficulty. 

The Ethics of Modernism

What was the ethical perspective of modernist literature? How did Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett represent ethical issues and develop their moral ideas? Lee Oser argues that thinking about human nature restores a perspective on modernist literature that has been lost. He offers detailed discussions of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics to illuminate close readings of major modernist texts. For Oser, the reception of Aristotle is crucial to the modernist moral project, which he defines as the effort to transform human nature through the use of art.

In the early twentieth century the Modernist novel tested literary conventions and expectations, challenging representations of reality, consciousness and identity. These novels were not simply creative masterpieces, however, but also crucial articulations of revolutionary developments in critical thought.
Tracing the developing modernist aesthetic in the thought and writings of James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, Deborah Parsons considers the cultural, social and personal influences upon the three writers.

Urban Memory :History and Amnesia in the Modern City brings together ideas about memory which bear upon the architectural and urban experience of the modern city. It presents a critical and creativity approach in the theorization of memory and focuses this burgeoning area of studies on the actual forms of the built environment in the modernist and post-industrial city.
Urban memory was a key theme in many of the leading modernist writers and social thinkers. Conversely, modernism in architecture and urbanism was more often devoted to a utopian ideal which seemed to erase memory from the city. More recently the two have come together. Cities that were once centers of intensely forward-looking modernist culture, now proclaim themselves as primarily palimpsest or 'memory-spaces'. This can be seen in a burgeoning of architects and architecture specializing in monuments to trauma, nostalgic collaborations between conservationists and developers; city centers which are proclaimed as 'urban villages'; and the ever increasing number of amenity groups, listed buildings, museums, historians, and preservation societies.

A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture is an essential resource for students and teachers of modernism. The volume brings together entries on elements of modernist culture, contemporary intellectual and aesthetic movements, and all the genres of modernist writing and art. At its heart are 25 essays on the signal texts of modernist literature, from James Joyce’s Ulysses to Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. The more than sixty contributors include some the most distinguished modernist scholars from both sides of the Atlantic.