This monumental eight-volume edition of modern literature brings together, for the first time in print, all of the vastly influential prose writings of Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot, the poet and dramatist whose theories and criticism shaped twentieth-century thought and literature around the world. This complete collection provides access to over 6,000 pages of Eliot's nonfiction prose writings on literature, philosophy, religion, cultural theory, world politics, and other topics of urgent and enduring import. It includes all of the essays that he collected in his lifetime, but also more than 1,000 uncollected, unrecorded, or unpublished items, many of which were missing or inaccessible for decades. From the formative "Interpretation of Primitive Ritual" (1913), written in graduate school at Harvard, to the summative "To Criticize the Critic" (1961), the Complete Prose offers readers full access to the immense scope and variety of Eliot's works in their biographical, historical, and cultural context.
The individual volumes have received the highest praise from prominent scholars: volume II won the Modernist Studies Association's 2015 Book Prize for an Edition, Anthology, or Essay Collection, while volumes V and VI were jointly awarded the 2017 Prize for a Scholarly Edition by the Modern Language Association. They display "uniform excellence," wrote the Awards Committee: "Their thorough textual introductions, sophisticated annotations merging intelligent commentary with brevity and completeness, make the volumes a pleasure to read . . . and enlarge our understanding of Eliot as the public intellectual at work." Together with recent editions of the Poems, the eight volumes of Letters, and the sensational opening in 2020 of Eliot's letters to Emily Hale, the Complete Prose brings us to the threshold of a new age for the study of Eliot and the modernist writers of his day.
Project MUSE is home to the fully searchable online edition of the Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot.
Volume 1: Apprentice Years, 1905–1918, edited by Jewel Spears Brooker and Ronald Schuchard
Volume 2: The Perfect Critic, 1919–1926, edited by Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard
Volume 3: Literature, Politics, Belief, 1927–1929, edited by Frances Dickey, Jennifer Formichelli, and Ronald Schuchard
Volume 4: English Lion, 1930–1933, edited by Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard
Volume 5: Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934–1939, edited by Iman Javadi, Ronald Schuchard, and Jayme Stayer
Volume 6: The War Years, 1940–1946, edited by David E. Chinitz and Ronald Schuchard
Volume 7: A European Society, 1947–1953, edited by Iman Javadi and Ronald Schuchard
Volume 8: Still and Still Moving, 1954–1965, edited by Jewel Spears Brooker and Ronald Schuchard
