Books by G. Atkins

By reading T.S. Eliot literally and laterally, and attending to his intra-textuality, G. Douglas Atkins challenges the familiar notion of Eliot as bent on escaping this world for the spiritual. This study culminates in the necessary, but seemingly impossible, union of reading and writing, literature and commentary.

This highly readable book represents a unique approach to the controverted matter of the relations of literature and religion, eschewing linear argument in favor of a nuanced essayistic manner that elucidates texts and issues of immediate and lasting concern.

Rooted in close reading of texts, including the essays of E.B. White, this comprehensive assessment of the oft-slighted subform of the literary essay situates the familiar at the heart of the essay as form.

Eliot: The Poet as Christian, this gracefully executed new book brings to a triumphant conclusion the unique effort to pinpoint and identify the Christian characteristics of Eliot's poetic art. The book offers a close but companionable reading of each of the complex poems that make up Four Quartets, the essay-poem that is Eliot's masterwork.

This is the first full-scale analysis of T.S. Eliot's six "Ariel Poems" as Christmas poems. Through close readings, Atkins argues that these poems considered together emerge as clearly related representations of the "impossible union" that occurred in the Incarnation.

In a fresh reading of Gulliver's Travels and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Atkins draws parallels between the protagonists: both Lemuel Gulliver and Stephen Dedalus flee from the burdens of life, seeking a transcendent existence. The study sheds important new light on both novels as essential critiques of modern misunderstandings.

By comparing and contrasting the pre-conversion and the post-conversion poetics and poetic practices of T.S. Eliot, this book elucidates the responsibilities and opportunities for a poet who is also Christian. This book is the second in a trilogy which includes T.S. Eliot, Lancelot Andrewes, and the Word.

Here, G. Douglas Atkins offers a fresh new reading of the past century's most famous poem in English, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). Using a comparatist approach that is both intra-textual and inter-textual, this book is a bold analysis of satire of modern forms of misunderstanding.

With special attention to the poems For Lancelot Andrewes, Journey of the Magi, and Ash-Wednesday , G. Douglas Atkins offers an exciting new analysis of T.S. Eliot's debt to the seventeenth-century churchman Lancelot Andrewes and his theories of reading and writing texts.

More than three centuries later, Jonathan Swift's writing remains striking and relevant. In this engaging study, Atkins brings forty-plus years of critical experience to bear on some of the greatest satires ever written, revealing new contexts for understanding post-Reformation reading practices and the development of the modern personal essay.

A fresh look at the greatest poet of early eighteenth-century England, this highly readable book focuses on Pope's religious thinking and major poems. G. Douglas Atkins extends the argument that the Roman Catholic poet was no Deist, 'closet' or otherwise.

This book offers an exciting new approach to T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets as it shows why it should be read both closely and in relation to Eliot's other works, notably the poems The Waste Land, 'The Hollow Men,' and Ash-Wednesday.

This is the first book-length critical study of E.B. White, the American essayist and author of Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web, The Trumpet of the Swan . G. Douglas Atkins focuses on White and the writing life, offering detailed readings of the major essays and revealing White's distinctiveness as an essayist.