Death by capitalism in Eliot's The Waste Land. Issue 5 (4th May 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Carver, Beci
• Is Part Of: Textual practice. Volume 36:Issue 5(2022)
• Page Start: 831
• Page End: 849
• Publication Date: 2022-05-04
• Subjects: Capitalism -- Eliot -- socialism -- empire -- economics; Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals; Semiotics -- Periodicals; 801.95
• DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2020.1839948
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0950-236X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article is an attempt to construct a socialist Eliot, whose familiarity with German economic policy in the 1910s and 1920s exposed him to a version of socialist economics that caught his imagination. In this essay, I focus on the year that preceded Eliot's breakdown, when a number of significant mergers transformed British banking, concentrating the industry's power and wealth among a nucleus of 'Big Banks'. I understand Eliot to have witnessed the dawn of what Rudolf Hilderding terms 'finance capital', and to have recoiled in horror. I read 'Death by Water' as an elegy for a lost era in the history of capitalism, when, as Hilferding suggests, the dependence of economic systems on 'direct relationship[s] between members of society' made a version of 'socialist' banking thinkable.