Prufrock Among the Bohemians: The Dissemination of "Prufrock" through the Twentieth Century

This thesis examines the dissemination of T.S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" through the twentieth century. While scholars seem interested in "Prufrock" as an influential poem, it seems there is limited scholarship on how its influence was propagated. This thesis posits that Bohemianism was the cultural milieu by which "Prufrock" gained popularity and was subsequently appropriated. This thesis looks to Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931), Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch (1963; English translation 1966), and Jack Kerouac's Big Sur (1962) as hypertexts of "Prufrock" and as examples of how Bohemianism acted as a factor in its appropriation. This thesis finds that Bohemianism, as a culture of collaboration built on its own myth, is a powerful source of intertextuality that likely could have subsumed "Prufrock" as part of that myth.