Re-Writing The Waste Land

Abstract

In the opening chapter of this book I considered the distress of writing in terms of the plethoric ‘many books’ of whose making there is no end. I also considered the plethora of history and the search for a beginning, both of writing and of the world, along with the plethora of self in Montaigne’s ‘diverse … subject’ and the fear of self in Eliot’s experience of ‘some stuff impossible to ‘drag to light’. Having gathered the questions of self and history in the last two chapters, I should like to return to that opening so as to confront all these matters again, not at large but with reference to Eliot’s own re-working of them in Four Quartets.