Modern Eve

This book reveals how this famously fragmented poem is unified by Classicism and the 'mythic method'. Shows that a mythic layer underlies and undermines the fragmented layer of The Waste Land, making it one of the greatest poem ever written, in which the dark Adam of egoist modernity assaults the typist as Eve, and as all women.

Reviews

Professorial remarks on the thesis that informs these books. "A very scholarly thesis ... The thesis makes significant gains in terms of advancing new ideas and developing existing scholarship on Eliot. It offers an exceptionally thorough exploration of images and allusions that have sometimes baffled readers of The Waste Land ... the Church of St Magnus the Martyr is seen as the meeting place for the powerful constellation of ideas informing Eliot's 1922 modernist composition, with the nearby London Bridge (also mentioned in the poem) serving as a point of entry into Eliot's imaginative world, as well as a locus of transition between the different historical, theological, and political realms that are represented in the poem ... the dialogue with Nietzsche that runs throughout the thesis is genuinely illuminating. The thesis is very well written, and it makes a valuable and distinctive contribution to scholarship".