Twentieth Century American Fiction: T.S. Eliot’s Children

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is known to be the epic of the twentieth century in its spirit and subject matter. It offers a new idiom to the generation of readers, writers, and researchers in crystallizing how to capture in words the submerged psychic currents of a fractured sensibility. In America it surprisingly turns out to be the most popular poem among the novelist’s ad short story writers, perpetually used as a model for the reflection of American experience in a world ravaged by the two world wars. Eliot’s intellectual rigor and vast erudition however has not been easy to emulate. The American novelists nevertheless have been continuously inspired by Eliot’s innovative use of language, myths, metaphors, objective correlatives, allusions, symbols, images, and several other poetic short hands. We have today a whole clan of Eliot’s children in America. The critical essays in the present anthology highlight an interesting persistence of the Waste land syndrome in the twentieth century America Fiction.