Name of the Book :  ‘Beyond The Ages’ ( Tracing Heritage, Culture, Tradition and Technology through Literature)

Name of the Chapter : "Reconfiguring Tradition: Eliot’s 'Prufrock' and 'Gerontion’ as Modernist and Postmodernist Challenges to Pre-Modern Literary Norms"

Authors :    Mr. Rajib Saha  &  Mr. Bishnu P Gogoi

Publisher :  Mind Reading Publications

ISBN : 978-93-92150-91-3

DOI   : doi.org/10.34293/mrp.9789392150913

The chapter examines how T.S. Eliot's protagonists in 'Gerontion' and 'The Love Song of  J. Alfred Prufrock' embody 20th-century literary rebellion against pre-modernism, tracing their evolution into modern or postmodern heroes and demonstrating the deconstruction and abrupt disintegration of pre-modern literary traditions. It argues that Prufrock’s and Gerontion’s shake-up of English poetry is justified and philosophic, using literary criticism and textual analysis to illustrate how Eliot’s poetry challenges the moral certainties of English Classical Literature and, how Eliot innovated criticism and the twentieth century free verse and irregular rhymed modernism and postmodernism, thereby negating and superseding the previous traditions.