Martin Rowson’s Waste Land: From Parody to Pastiche

Abstract

This article places Martin Rowson’s graphic novel parody of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land within the context of changing views of modernism, postmodernism, popular culture, and the graphic novel. Taking the same title as Eliot’s poem, Rowson’s parody, ostensibly intended to attack Eliot’s elitist allusive literary practice, develops its own hyper-distracting visual allusive density. The result is a graphic virtuosity that, perhaps surprisingly, returns to the lyrical and existential grounds of Eliot’s original poem.