"This collection of new essays brings together scholars from a wide range of critical approaches to study T. S. Eliot's engagement with desire, homoeroticism, and early twentieth-century feminism in his poetry, prose, and drama. Ranging from historical and formalist literary criticism to psychological and psychoanalytic theory and cultural studies, Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot illuminates such topics as the influence of Eliot's mother - a poet and social reformer - on his art; the aesthetic function of physical desire; the dynamic of homosexuality in his poetry and prose; and his identification with passive or "feminine" desire in his poetry and drama. The book also charts his reception by female critics from the early twentieth century to the present. This book should be essential reading for students of Eliot and modernism, as well as queer theory and gender studies."--BOOK JACKET