Intertextuality and literary adaptation exemplified by T.S. Eliots "The Waste Land"

Melanie Heiland

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Essay from the year 2011 in the subject Literature - Comparative Literature, grade: 3, University of Coimbra, language: English, ...

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Essay from the year 2011 in the subject Literature - Comparative Literature, grade: 3, University of Coimbra, language: English, abstract: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal", T.S. Eliot once said himself. What he probably wanted to express with that statement was the fact that every poet takes ideas from his role models and transforms them into something new - even though one would not necessarily call this procedure "stealing", but rather "adoption". This is going to be also the topic of the following essay: the adoption of a certain subject-matter over several centuries. The major part of my investigations is going to deal with T.S. Eliot's famous poem The Waste Land. After giving a short summary of the background and creation of the poem, I am going to depict the references between Eliots poem, Geoffrey Chaucer s The Canterbury Tales and David Lodge s novel Small World by the example of their description of the month april. In doing so, I am going to analyse the similarities and differences concerning contents, style and adaptation of the literary material and deconstruct how the material that was first elaborated by Chaucer later is readopted and converted into a modern poem resp. narrative by Eliot and Lodge. The following questions are going to lead through the whole essay: What are the basic issues that all of the three discussed writers deal with? How was the subject-matter that first turned up in Chaucer s writings transformed by Eliot and Lodge? What is the main difference between the text from the 14th century and the modern readings? The aim of this essay is to demonstrate how intertextuality works and the phenomenon that no piece of poetry is thinkable without its reference to the entirety of earlier writings.