This course will deal with Woolf and Eliot as novelist and poet and also as writers who, as Helen Gardner said, lifting from Coleridge, created the taste by which they were enjoyed. But the two "tastes" they created were quite different, and their difference charts a major shift in the history of twentieth century Anglo-American writing. Eliot dominated the century from his publication of the essays in The Sacred Wood in 1920 and publication of The Waste Land in 1922, to well beyond the second world war. Woolf, however, was "received into the canon," as Frank Kermode so grandly put it, only in the 1970's, and as a consequence, in large part, of American, not English, criticism. The "tradition" as Eliot saw it was the "ideal" order of his essay on "Tradition and the Individual Talent": "all of the literature of Europe from Homer." However thoroughly she may have been versed in Eliot's "tradition," and however much she took pleasure and made meaning in invoking it, Woolf fractured that classic sense of beginnings. The "origins" of her writing and of writing she thought like hers, were as likely to be found in the silence of Shakespeare's sister or in the unintelligible utterance of the old woman at the tube stop in Mrs Dalloway. She actively scanned the past for a different, if not so ideal, order, and she initiated a new sense of what "tradition" might mean. In the latter third of the twentieth century, Woolf herself became the generating centre of a process of extensive historical revision. By the end of the century, she could be seen as dominating it in the power of what she had launched. The course will look at the ways in which these two major modernists reflect the larger shifts of the century.