Unreal cities and undead legacies: T.S. Eliot and Gothic hauntings in Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Barnes’s Nightwood

By the mid 1930s, when Waugh’sA Handful of Dustand Barnes’sNightwoodwere published,The Waste Land(1922) had been absorbed into high culture and T.S. Eliot was established as an important man of letters both in England and in the United States. The transatlantic nature of Modernism itself, exemplified by the lives and works of Eliot, H.D., Pound, Stein and Barnes, was part of a newly dynamised interchange between America and Europe that was to influence the course of culture and politics for the rest of the twentieth century. However, assessments of Eliot’s role as poet and critic