ABSTRACT
By digging deeply into the details and contextof the language and cultural materials embedded within literature, we can use the tools of literary analysis to understand how an individual textworks and why it works that way, but reading literature in isolation overlooks the relationships among different texts that contribute further to their meanings. Modernist poet and criticT. S. Eliot (1921, p. 44) cautions, ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone …. [Y]ou must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead’ who have established the literary tradition of the past. In this passage, Eliot calls for comparison with the classics to determine which texts are truly original and to evaluate individual authors against their measuring stick, but comparison can expand literary analysis in several other ways as well.
