FAQ: The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot

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1 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Jack Holmes (410) , August 11, 2014 FAQ: The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PUBLISHING THIS MATERIAL AND WHY HAVE ELIOT S PROSE WORKS BEEN UNAVAILABLE FOR SO LONG? The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot: The Critical Edition gathers for the first time in one place the collected, uncollected, and unpublished prose of one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century. The result of a multi-year collaboration among Eliot s Estate, Faber and Faber Ltd., Johns Hopkins University Press, the Beck Digital Center of Emory University, and the Institute of English Studies, University of London, this eight-volume critical edition dramatically expands access to material that has been restricted or inaccessible in private and institutional collections for almost fifty years. Eliot engaged the modern world and entered into dialogue with its intellectuals in numerous fields, writing comprehensively on poetry, fiction, drama, literary criticism, religion, humanism, cultural and economic theory, education, world politics, and other topics of intellectual import. General Editor Ronald Schuchard describes this work as an opportunity to restore Eliot s full voice in the public domain and to bring back into hearing the voices of those with whom he struggled to resolve the problems and dilemmas of his time. Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 N. Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland

2 WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF DIGITAL PUBLICATION? The fully searchable, integrative edition includes all of Eliot s collected essays, reviews, lectures, commentaries from The Criterion, and letters to editors, including more than 700 uncollected and 150 unpublished pieces from 1905 to Other highlights include essays from his student years at Smith Academy and Harvard and his graduate work at Harvard and Oxford, including his doctoral dissertation; unsigned, unidentified essays published in the New Statesman and the Monist; essays and reviews published in the Egoist, Athenaeum, TLS, Dial, Art and Letters; his Clark and Turnbull lectures on metaphysical poetry, Norton Lectures, Page-Barbour Lectures, Boutwood Lectures; unpublished essays, lectures, addresses from various archives; and transcripts of broadcasts, speeches, endorsements, and memorial tributes. Each item has been textually edited, annotated, and cross-referenced by an international group of leading Eliot scholars, led by Schuchard, a renowned scholar of Eliot and Modernism. WILL THERE BE PRINT EDITIONS OF THE COMPLETE PROSE? The digital volumes will be released in sequence and published on Project MUSE, with an archival print edition to be published once all eight volumes have been released. The first two volumes, Apprentice Years, and The Perfect Critic, will be published in 2014, with pairs of subsequent volumes scheduled for release in successive years.

3 WHO PROVIDED FINANCIAL SUPPORT FOR THE PROJECT? The editorial project has been supported by grants from the Hodson Trust, the Eliot Estate, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Lewis H. Beck Foundation, the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom, and the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. WHO IS RONALD SCHCHARD? Ronald Schuchard, one of the world s leading Eliot scholars, is the Goodrich C. White Professor of English, Emeritus, at Emory University He is the author of award-winning Eliot s Dark Angel (1999) and The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts (2008). The editor of Eliot s Clark and Turnbull lectures, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (1993), he is co-editor with John Kelly of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume 3 (1994), Volume 4 (2005), winner of the MLA s Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters, and Volume 5 (forthcoming). A former Guggenheim fellow and founder-director of the T. S. Eliot International Summer School ( ), he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. WHAT IS COVERED IN VOLUME ONE? Apprentice Years, , Volume 1 of The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, includes all surviving prose from Eliot s years as a student and from his first three years as a literary journalist. Spanning the most formative period in his life, the collection begins with a story composed when he was a sixteen-year-old student at the Smith Academy in St. Louis and ends with

4 a review published when he was thirty and an established man of letters in London. The volume contains twenty-six previously unpublished essays in philosophy and nearly one hundred pieces published in periodicals but never collected. Apprentice Years, is divided into three parts. The first features stories and reviews written between 1905 and 1910 while Eliot was a day student at Smith Academy and an undergraduate at Harvard. The second consists of essays in philosophy and ethics written between 1912 and 1915 when he was a graduate student at Harvard and Oxford. The culmination of this work was his doctoral dissertation on F. H. Bradley, here published for the first time in a critical edition. Articles and reviews written between 1915 and 1918 constitute the third group, beginning with pieces related to Eliot s credentials in philosophy and the social sciences and concluding with essays and reviews in little magazines and journals published while Eliot established himself in literary circles. Apprentice Years contains a detailed historical introduction that traces Eliot s intellectual development from broad interests in language and literature to intensive study of F. H. Bradley and Aristotle to an informed synthesis of literature and philosophy in literary criticism. WHAT IS COVERED IN VOLUME TWO? The Perfect Critic, , Volume 2 of The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, documents Eliot s emergence as an authoritative and commanding critical voice in twentieth-century letters. The essays and reviews in this volume, most of which were never republished or collected after their first appearances in periodicals, trace the swift and astonishing arc of his rise to international prominence as an incisive critic of literature and culture, an avant-garde poet, and an editor of a successful and celebrated London journal. These seven years register the seismic shift in

5 modern poetry that comes with the publication of The Waste Land (1922), and they witness the appearance of Eliot s first collected volume of verse, Poems, (1925). Eliot composed not less than 130 essays, reviews, and letters during this brief time, publishing in venues as various as The Athenaeum, The Times Literary Supplement, La Nouvelle Revue française, The Dial, and Vanity Fair. Such a period of intense creativity and prolific critical writing is all the more remarkable when considered against the backdrop of the extraordinary upheavals in his personal life: the unexpected deaths of his father and sister, the dismal mental and physical health of his wife Vivienne, and Eliot s own psychological breakdown and treatment. The volume features a thorough historical introduction that describes the dynamic and challenging circumstances, both personal and professional, that faced him as he began to establish his critical reputation in London literary circles and beyond. For more information, contact Jack Holmes at jmh@press.jhu.edu or