Tradition, order, war and the dead

pp. 77-103

in: Jane Goldman, Modernism, 1910–1945, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

Abstract

Whereas Woolf's "Modern Fiction" has been an important source for modernist critical methodologies and reading practice, Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent", published shortly after the first version of Woolf's essay ("Modern Novels"), has become foundational in theorising modernism, by providing a general framework and critical apparatus. It has shaped a particular critical context, then, in which we read Modernism. The essay also provides a critical vocabulary for thinking about individual texts in larger contexts, or individual writers within a (or the) canon. From this derives a tricky theory of subjectivity, Eliot's anti-Romantic notion of poetic impersonality. Most importantly, Eliot's essay seeks to position change and "the new" firmly back in "tradition", in an unchanging ideal order remote from the specificities of historical change that we have come to associate, for example, with the date of December 1910.