T. S. Eliot's 'Athenaeum' reviews: Rhetoric, drama, and the critical point of view

This study considers a subset of T. S. Eliot's critical prose, the book reviews written for The Athenaeum in 1919 and 1920, examining how Eliot's literary dicta meshed with his rhetorical strategies for establishing literary authority and with the self-conscious role-playing central to his early periodical work. This approach provides an alternative understanding of Eliot as a critic, an understanding which complements the several extant studies of Eliot's critical career as a whole. The majority of the earlier studies have attempted to extract and then reconstruct or deconstruct Eliot's presumed philosophical system. This study, by contrast, shows how his philosophical and theoretical abstractions function and interact in their original journalistic environment.;The study is developed on three themes in the Athenaeum reviews: rhetoric, drama, and criticism. The ten chapters of the study are thus gathered into three sections. The first section treats the rhetorical elements of the reviews; the second examines their dramatic elements; the third considers the reviews as criticism per se. The penultimate chapter in particular is devoted to the subject of Eliot's deployment of the "point of view" as a literary criterion and a personal literary strategy.;It is my contention that Eliot's criticism cannot be satisfactorily explicated only as a body of objective pronouncements on literature, but that it is just as great a mistake to assume that we are excused from seriously considering Eliot's critical statements as such simply because of their subjective, rhetorical grounding. Eliot's book reviewing stretches the boundaries of the genre in all directions and deserves to be read for what it is, with consideration for all its rhetoric, polemic, class concerns, role-playing, autobiographical allusion, and genre-enriching formal attributes. It is within these contexts, rather than within the artificial context of the Selected Essays, that the literary-critical and theoretical pronouncements of Eliot's journal contributions can be best understood.