Resident aliens: T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and the transatlantic cultural landscape

Thesis

The antithetical nature of T. S. Eliot’s and W. H. Auden’s transatlantic immigrations continues to vex the same question of these two renowned, canonical poets’ national identities, to which Eliot ambiguously responded that ‘which ever Mr Auden is, I suppose I must be the other’. As the first full-length comparative study of Eliot and Auden, this thesis follows Eliot’s lead, in placing himself in relation to Auden, to examine how each poet constructed and marketed multiple and sometimes contradictory versions of their cultural identities in relation to the rapidly changing and diverse transatlantic cultural landscape of the early to mid-twentieth century. While the transnational turn in literary studies has argued for concepts of literature that overflow the boundaries of nation, Eliot’s and Auden’s success as resident alien writers, who became centrepieces of the Anglo-American canon by deftly drawing upon their multifaceted identifies to prepare faces ‘to meet the faces [they would] meet’, challenges the implied notion of a homogenous Anglo-American cultural sphere. Building from recent advances in modernist periodical studies, which have shown the extent to which one of the key institutions of modernism, the little magazine, was still circumscribed by national specificities, this thesis re-situates Eliot and Auden within these historical circulation contexts in which ‘they became themselves’. By exploring Eliot’s and/or Auden’s relations to five little magazines — The Little Review, The Egoist, The Criterion, Horizon, and Encounter — which played critical roles in shaping the history of modernism, this study traces how closely interconnected the various cultural identities, which each writer constructed were with the particular context and cultural politics represented by each magazine. Revealing how each writer’s cultural interventions and authorial self-fashioning were often mutually complementary endeavours, ‘Resident Aliens’ offers a new and revivifying understanding of two major poets and the impact of their efforts on British and American literary and cultural identity as we know them today.

Authors: Rucker, Z

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-vqq7eaev0
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: W. H. Auden; modernism; little magazines; T. S. Eliot; self-fashioning; Anglo-American; transnational
• Subjects: English; Intellectual life--History--20th century