The lack of critical attention given to the important relationship between T. S. Eliot and Gustave Flaubert represents a surprising and concerning lacuna in the field of modernist studies, an oversight that this book undertakes to correct through an examination of the analogous manner in which each conceives of the ascetic saint as an emblematic figure for their aesthetic praxis. My analysis highlights the compatibility of the two authors, focusing especially on the works in which their interrelation is most prominent and most fruitful: La Tentation de Saint Antoine and The Waste Land. The comparison between these two texts is made not only on the basis of certain thematic and descriptive details that they have in common, but most crucially on account of the deep-lying structural kinship that bears testament to an enduring fascination on the part of both authors with the ascetic performance of the saint.

The purpose of joining these two texts has three aspects: to establish the Tentation as a definitively avant-modernist text; to explore more thoroughly Lyndall Gordon's suggestion, in her discussion of Eliot's ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’, that ‘it is crucial to see The Waste Land, indeed all of Eliot's subsequent work, in the context of this early story of an aspiring saint’ and to set both works firmly in the context of the saint's experience, showing the analogy that both writers explore between artistic and religious inspiration and the subsequent equation of the artist's creative process with the saint's via negativa.