Academic literature on the topic 'Waugh, Evelyn, 1903-1966'

Evelyn waugh, 1903 - 1966, est un romancier anglais, peu connu en france mais qui jouit d'une grande notoriete en angleterre et dans les pays de langue anglaise. Son oeuvre la plus celebre est brideshead revisited. Nous l'avons analysee dans cette these car elle traite sous forme de roman du probleme de la foi au sein d'une famille catholique en proie a toutes les vicissitudes de notre temps. Dans une premiere partie biographique, nous avons suivi l'auteur tout au long de sa vie, dans sa famille et parmi ses amis, dans le contexte du siecle. Nous avons tente de tirer un portrait de l'auteur qui nous est apparu comme un homme anarchique et debauche a l'encontre de ses convictions et de ses pratiques religieuses. Evelyn waugh est ne dans une famille anglicane, pieu dans son enfance, agnostique dans sa jeunesse et finalement converti au catholicisme en i930 a l'age de 27 ans. Des lors, il fait de sa foi l'essentiel de sa vie, sans toutefois reussir a se comporter comme un saint. Il n'a jamais cesse d'ecrire; ses romans et recits de voyages sont brillants et captivants. Nous avons choisi d'analyser ses ouvrages d'apologie, temoignages de sa religion. Si evelyn waugh a reussi a nous convaincre de la sincerite de sa foi il n'a pas pour autant modifie son mode de vie contraire aux preceptes de sa reli♭ gion. Il demeure un grand prosateur, un brillant humoriste, admire du monde litteraire.

Evelyn waugh fut envoye a deux reprises en ethiopie en tant que journaliste, une premiere fois par le times a l'occasion du couronnement du negus, la seconde par le daily mail pour couvrir la guerre italo-ethiopienne. Il assista donc aux deux evenements majeurs des annees 30 dans ce pays. A ce titre, il appartenait a cette epoque au petit cercle des specialistes de l'ethiopie. De ces sejours sont issues quatre publications : deux recits de voyage remote people (1931) et waugh in abyssinia (1936) et deux romans black mischief (1932) et scoop (1938), qui, a cause des prises de position de waugh a l'epoque, sont assez peu utilisees dans le cadre des etudes ethiopiennes. Ce memoire se donne pour but de le reintegrer dans le champ de ces etudes. Il examine tout d'abord les rapports entre l'auteur et les voyages, voyage en ethiopie et voyage en orient pour se centrer ensuite sur les particularites de waugh dans ses rapports a l'ecrit et dans ses rapports a l'ethiopie. La technique d'ecriture et la confrontation de l'auteur avec ses contemporains font apparaitre des aspects de l'originalite de waugh : il met en oeuvre un style et un point de vue tout a fait particuliers. Une derniere partie enfin, etudie les rapports de waugh avec les themes italiens. Ce travail est accompagne de deux annexes : une premiere, basee sur l'analyse de cartes anciennes, a propos du nomadisme geographique du mot "ethiopie" ; la seconde, en version bilingue, etablit l'integralite des textes de waugh sur l'ethiopie
Evelyn waugh was send twice as a journalist in ethiopia, a first time as special correspondent of the times on the occasion of the haile selassie's coronation, a second one by the daily mailto cover the italo-ethiopian war. So he attended the two most important events of the thirties in this country. He belonged at this time to the very narrow circle of specialists of ethiopia. He wrote four books about ethiopia : two travel books remote people (1931) and waugh in abyssinia (1936) and two novels black mischief (1932) and scoop (1938), which are scarcely used in ethiopian studies because of waugh's political ideas. The objective of this thesis is to integrate waugh into ethiopian studies. It first studies the relations between the author and the travels, travel to ethiopia and travel to the east, then to focus on waugh's particularities in his writing and in his relations with ethiopia, his writing style and the comparison with his contemporary writers show several aspects of waugh's originality : he used very uncommon style and point of view. The last part studies the relations between waugh and italian propaganda. This work is followed by two appendices : the first one, based on analysis of old maps, about the geographical wandering of the word "ethiopia" ; the second one gives, in french and in english, the whole writings of waugh about ethiopia

Ce travail se propose d'explorer de façon systématique, et donc chronologique, les multiples facettes que prend le concept de demeure à travers l'œuvre de Waugh. Du début à la fin de sa vie, il n'a cessé de s'intéresser aux demeures, qui ont été ses compagnes de tous les instants, il les a décrites à l'envi et leur a donné un contenu symbolique indéniable que nous nous sommes efforcés de mettre en lumière. Les acceptions données par Waugh à la demeure se sont modifiées et enrichies avec le temps, mais il y a des constantes que nous avons soulignées. Nous avons retenu trois approches pour étudier notre sujet : le niveau de base est l'intérêt concret que Waugh porte aux constructions de son pays, ou d'ailleurs, et leur traduction dans l'œuvre littéraire, principalement, mais non exclusivement, romanesque. Le deuxième niveau est le contenu symbolique de ces demeures, rempart contre la barbarie moderne, reflet du caractère de son propriétaire jugé par sa considération pour ses vieilles pierres, symbole de la cité sainte assiégée par les forces du mal. Leur spécificité britannique a aussi retenu notre attention. Le troisième niveau de l'étude est proprement littéraire, Waugh avouant lui-même qu'il construisait ses romans comme un architecte bâtit une demeure. Waugh ayant choisi d'essayer de vivre comme un de ses personnages, il a semblé intéressant de confronter sa conception de l'habitat réel à celle qu'il met en scène, d'analyser ses connaissances en architecture, ainsi que la contradiction entre ses convictions catholiques et son grand besoin de paraître et de posséder
The aim of this piece of research is to delve into the multi-faceted world of Evelyn Waugh's great houses, in a systematic and chronological way. A lifelong interest of his, he never tired of studying them: he described them thoroughly, never failing to convey their symbolic value, the strands of which we have striven to unravel. Over the years, Waugh segued from blind admiration into a more mature assessment of great houses, but they never ceased being a hallmark of his work. This thesis tackles the study of great houses in a three-pronged way: first, the study of the many buildings (British and foreign) that intersperse the novels, books and articles of Waugh; then, the symbolic value attributed to those buildings comes under scrutiny - they stand for civilization vs. The barbarity of the modern age, they are a metaphor of the holy city besieged by dark and evil forces, they are mirrors held up to the owners, reflecting their vices or virtues. The particular aspect of the British ness of the concept `house' is also pinpointed. Finally, as Waugh himself admitted to writing a book as if he were an architect building a house, this simile is consistently explored, and the way the novels are written dissected. Waugh tried to live the life of one his own characters, so Waugh's own houses is an avenue to go down. The true extent of his architectural knowledge is assessed, so is the contradiction between his Roman Catholicism and his thirst for material possessions and upward mobility aspirations

The modern soundscape buzzes with noise. In the 1930s, telephones, radios, and gramophones filled domestic spaces with technological noise, while crowds shouting in the streets created political clamour. During the war in the 1940s, bombs and sirens broke through buildings and burst through consciousness. This dissertation examines the response of three British modernist writers to the cultural shifts brought about by technology and politics, which altered everyday experience and social relations. Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh, and George Orwell represent noise in their fiction and nonfiction as a trope of power. Noise, as a palpable emblem of discontent and the acoustic unconsciousness of the period, infiltrates sentences and rearranges syntax, as in the invention of Newspeak in Nineteen Eight-Four. Noise cannot leave listeners in a neutral position. The "culture racket" of the 1930s and 1940s required urgent new ways of listening and listening with ethical intent.
Chapter One provides a reading of Elizabeth Bowen's audible terrains in her novels of the 1930s, where silences and sudden noises intrude on human lives. In Bowen's novels, technological noise has both comedic and tragic consequences. Chapter Two examines noise as a political signifier in The Heat of the Day, Bowen's novel of the blitz. Chapter Three takes up the significance of the culture racket to Evelyn Waugh's novels and travel writing of the 1930s; noise assumes a disruptive, if highly comedic, value in his works, an ambiguity that expresses what it means to be modern. Chapter Four examines Waugh's penchant for satirizing the phoneyness of contemporary culture---its political vacillations---especially in Put Out More Flags, set during the Second World War. Chapter Five considers Orwell's engagement with the emerging social and political formations amongst working, racial, and warring classes in the 1930s. Documenting noise in his reportage, Orwell sounds alarms to alert readers to the mounting social and political crises in his realist novels of the decade. Chapter Six argues that Orwell's final two novels of the 1940s, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, represent the politics of noise in as much as they announce the noise of politics in totalitarian futures. Noise demarcates the insidiousness of propaganda as it screeches from telescreens, the keynote in Big Brother's ideological symphony of domination. Noise, throughout Orwell's writing, signifies the struggle for power. In its widest ramifications, noise provides an interpretive paradigm through which to read Bowen's, Waugh's, and Orwell's fiction and non-fiction, as well as modernist texts generally.

Thesis (S.B. in Literature)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Humanities, 2011.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 64-66).
Introduction: Last Fall semester I had only a very vague idea of a thesis topic: with a broad interest in the conflict between romantic love and religion inspired in part by a summertime reading of Brideshead Revisited, I spent a few evenings sharing company with St. Augustine, Abelard and Eloise, and Julian of Norwich. My interest in serious religion was quickly satisfied. Soon after choosing to focus on twentieth century British Catholic novelists-Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and Evelyn Waugh-I realized the extent to which my enjoyment of Waugh greatly surpassed that of all my other readings. Jabe, I told myself, if you are going to spend a year of your precious young time on a literature thesis, you had damn well better have fun. Evelyn Waugh it was. His work is often noted for its contradictory nature. A devout Catholic, he was also somewhat of a misanthrope; across and within works he mixes bitter, hilarious satire with authentic, often quiet, human concern to a powerful effect that proves remarkably difficult to analyze. The distant narrator of many of his works and the romantic narrator of others both seem at odds with the public Waugh, a crotchety, outspoken conservative to whom critics often refer. Thus it was somewhat with the interest of finding a "new voice" in Waugh that I began my project. I did not find the voice I expected, but eight months, countless hours of reading and discussion, and many drafts later, my interest in the complex workings of Waugh's work has only deepened, surely the sign of a successful topic choice. While there have been numerous biographies of Evelyn Waugh in recent years, with another due to be published in several months, there has been a notable dearth of full-length, or indeed even article-length, critical texts on Waugh's work. This phenomenon can perhaps be explained in part by the seemingly autobiographical nature of his best-known novel, Brideshead Revisited, which was adapted in 1981 into an enduringly popular BBC miniseries and in 2008 into a full-length feature film. However, it is not only the popular imagination that seems to be captivated by Waugh's life; numerous critics of Waugh attempt to understand his work through the lens of his biography, using details such as his conversion to Catholicism early in his career or his political writings and public statements to inform their readings of his novels. The themes and qualities of Waugh's novels are not easily unified across his career; the cynical work of his early career seem very much at odds with the sentimentality and overtly religious concerns of much of his later writings, of which Brideshead Revisited is the best-known example. Accordingly, Waugh's career is often divided into two sections. The first section begins in 1928 with the publication of his first novel Decline and Fall and ends before the publication of Brideshead Revisited in 1945, while the second section begins with Brideshead Revisited and continues to the end of Waugh's career, encompassing the historico-religious novel Helena and the Catholic war novels of the Sword of Honour trilogy. Attempts at reconciling these "two Waughs" recur throughout the criticism; many studies of Waugh as an author either read the later novels as representing Waugh's "true concerns" and attempt to fit the early satires into this model, or dispense altogether with trying to unify the concerns of Waugh's early and later works. According to James Carens, "in Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh turned from the nihilistic rejection of his early satires to an affirmative commitment; to satisfy the other impulse of the artist-rebel, as Albert Camus has described him, Waugh affirmed a vision which he believed gave unity to life." According to Frederick L. Beaty's reading of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh's "affirmative commitment" is a belief in God and Catholicism: The chaos that surrounds [Waugh] becomes not only tolerable but meaningful as he views from a radically changed perspective a universe he once saw in ironic terms. Relativism, paradox, and indeterminacy give way before the conviction that an immanent, transcendent Deity is the ultimate reality. Waugh's enunciation of this positive credo marks a conscious turning away from philosophical irony-with its essentially skeptical vision-as the underlying world view for his fiction. The conclusion of Brideshead Revisited thus functions as an articulation of Waugh's religious beliefs and a rejection of his earlier secular works; Beaty secures meaning in Waugh's writing by aligning each novel with Waugh's presumed personal philosophy. In contrast, non-biographical criticism of Waugh often fails to find consistent themes or concerns across the novels. Michael Gorra articulates this phenomenon well in the following argument, which begins with criticism of to Jeffrey Heath's The Picturesque Prison: Evelyn Waugh and His Writing: Like most of the explicitly Catholic criticism of Waugh, [Heath's book] places too much weight upon his comic prefigurations of his later beliefs. Most treatments of Waugh as a satirist tend, similarly, to read his career backwards.. .A useful corrective to accounts of Waugh as either Catholic apologist or satirist is David Lodge's argument in Evelyn Waugh that his early novels in particular contain "a mosaic of local comic and satiric effects rather than a consistent message." In this paper, I propose a different reading of Waugh: one that finds neither dogmatic affirmation nor disparate ingenious effects but finds rather the performance of a complex expression of the insecurity and energy of the modern world that disintegrates the traditional interpretation of Waugh's work as strict ironic satire.
S.B.in Literature

Après les écarts de jeunesse illustrés dans les premiers romans, dans les œuvres de la deuxième période (1945-1966), Evelyn Waugh met en scène le vide spirituel qui l’entoure, et insiste sur la nécessité d’y remédier. La puissance de l’écriture du romancier britannique repose sur la forme, le style, et la diversité des sujets, avec pour clef de voûte le conflit qui oppose civilisation et barbarie, relation chiasmique au cœur de l’œuvre, entre barbarie civilisée et civilisation barbare. Le journal, la correspondance, les articles, essais, comptes rendus littéraires, et œuvres de fiction dénoncent les contradictions éthiques et esthétiques du monde moderne, plaçant l’auteur contra mundum. Tour à tour critique et esthète, correspondant de guerre déterminé et entêté, penseur politique, observateur effronté des us et coutumes des pays découverts au cours de multiples voyages, catholique pieux et férocement religieux, toutes les facettes de l’écrivain se reflètent dans le miroir de l’écriture. L’enjeu ultime est, pour l’auteur, de défendre la langue anglaise et la tradition littéraire, tout en incarnant l’esprit d’un temps qu’il observe et critique, face aux valeurs d’un âge d’or révolu qu’il estime supérieures à celles du monde dans lequel il vit
After the youthful excesses illustrated in the novels of the first period, from 1945 to 1966, Evelyn Waugh’s works continue to condemn the spiritual vacuum that is at the core of the modern world, insisting more and more on the necessity to take up arms against it. The power of the British novelist’s writing comes from his form, his style, and the variety of topics discussed, all revolving around a central concept – the conflict that opposes civilization and barbarism. These notions entertain a chiasmic relationship, in between a civilized barbarism and a barbaric civilization. The diaries, correspondence, articles, essays, reviews and fictional works denounce the ethical and aesthetic contradictions of the modern world, positioning the author contra mundum. Waugh’s writing mirrors the many masks he adopts, a critique and an aesthete in turn, a determined and stubborn war correspondent, a political thinker, a bold observer of the customs of his country and of others, a pious catholic and a ferociously religious writer. What is ultimately at stake for him is the defence of the English language and its literary tradition, while at the same time embodying the spirit of an era that he observed and criticized, constantly measuring its flaws against the values of a bygone age that he deemed superior to the world he lived in

This thesis is an examination of how the themes of adultery and regeneration are interwoven and explored by selected English novelists in the first half of the twentieth century. It is essential to establish that Ford, Lawrence, Waugh and Greene do not adhere to the ‘archetypal' pattern of the adultery novel established in the nineteenth century and, in fact, turn that pattern on its head. Ford's The Good Soldier and Parade's End provide two differing perspectives. The first uses adultery as a metaphor for the disintegration of English society, mirroring the social disintegration that accompanied the First World War; Parade's End, however, presents an adulterous relationship as being a regenerative force in the post-war society. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover also uses an adulterous relationship as a means of addressing the need for social, and national, regeneration in the inter-war years. Waugh's A Handful of Dust presents a woman's adultery as the ruin of not only a good man, but also civilisation in general; Brideshead Revisited is more religious in tone and traces the spiritual regeneration of its central character, whose conversion, ironically, is made possible through his adulterous relationship. Similarly, Greene's The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair portray the process of spiritual regeneration; in both novels this movement towards salvation is intertwined with an exploration of adulterous love. The ultimate question probed in this thesis is how the twentieth century novel of adultery overturns the traditional literary approach to the subject. Adulterous unions and illegitimate children are no longer presented as being exclusively socially destabilising or subversive in these novels; most intriguingly significant is that, in some of these novels, the illegitimate child becomes a symbol of hope, and, indeed, of regeneration.

Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) is not usually regarded as a modernist writer, but his works reveal a productive ambivalence towards Modernism. In Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), and A Handful of Dust (1934), Waugh borrowed from or satirised elements of modernist culture: figures such as Le Corbusier, Henri Bergson, T. S. Eliot, and Marcel Proust; aesthetic movements including Futurism and Vorticism; and technology and culture encapsulated by jazz, silent film, the telephone, and the aeroplane. When he is regarded as a modernist it is usually as a modernist satirist, and in reference to these first four novels. The breadth of Waugh’s writing up until his death reveals his ongoing encounters with the literary, aesthetic, and intellectual currents of modernist culture.

Reconocido como uno de los grandes novelistas ingleses del siglo XX; artista criticado, admirado, odiado y envidiado a partes iguales. La trayectoria literaria de Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) es admirable. Autor versátil y polifacético, Waugh, cultivó con éxito varios géneros1, dando lugar a una obra rica y diversa, producto del pensamiento y el sentimiento de un escritor comprometido con las vicisitudes de su tiempo. Tras la II Guerra Mundial, el inglés percibe el colapso moral de la civilización europea y esto se hará sentir con claridad en sus obras, en donde la llaga social quedará muy vivamente retratada.