Hamlet and The New Poetic: James Joyce and T. S. Eliot - Overview

Overview

Hamlet and the New Poetic is an exploration of critical readings of Hamlet during the 19th and 20th centuries. During the Victorian era, Quillian argues, there was an "enormous and positive hold that Hamlet exerted on the literary imagination." This was followed by a "shift in perception" during the period of Modernism (c. 1911-1922) when T. S. Eliot and James Joyce condemned the play as a "failure." Jackson Bryer notes that this text includes an "informative reading" of Eliot's "Hamlet and His Problems" followed by "Eliot's changing attitudes towards this play in his later work."