This biography of Evelyn Waugh focuses on the early years and influences that molded his mind and character. The work discusses the early writings of Waugh and explains how his childhood experiences were very influential in how he confronted lifes dilemmas.

This is a comprehensive and detailed encyclopedia for readers of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, one of the most popular and critically acclaimed novels of the twentieth century. It contains 175 entries on all aspects of the novel, covering such topics as the novel's main characters; cultural, literary, and political references; themes; organization; homosexuality; the novel's critical reception; and its film adaptions. It also pays particular attention to the importance of Catholicism in the story, discussing such subjects as sin, good and evil, divine grace, time, art, and love. A helpful list of recommended readings is included.

'Brisk, lively and wonderfully entertaining' John Banville 'Excellent ... read this book' Literary Review 'The best single-volume life of the author available' Irish Times The much mythologised author of Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited was hailed by Graham Greene as 'the greatest novelist of my generation', yet reckoned by Hilaire Belloc to have been possessed by the devil. Evelyn Waugh's literary reputation has continued to rise since Greene's assessment in 1966. Fifty years after his death, Philip Eade draws on extensive unpublished sources to paint a fresh and compelling portrait of this endlessly fascinating man, telling the full story of his dramatic, colourful and frequently bizarre life.

In this volume of essays casting new light on aspects of Waugh's life and writings, the essential Waugh emerges as a diffident artist and a sensitive recorder not only of the Roaring Twenties but also of his century. Evelyn Waugh's undisputed talent and controversial personality are set off in a series of studies that provide new elements towards the understanding of the man and the artist: the annulment of his first marriage, his relations with the BBC are for the first time dealt with in depth and objectivity.

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) is one of the twentieth century’s great prose stylists and the author of a suite of devastating satires on modern English life, from his first unforgettably funny novel Decline and Fall, to his last work of fiction, “Basil Seal Rides Again.” Evelyn Waugh’s Satire: Texts and Contexts renews scholarly debates central to Waugh’s work: the forms of his satire, his attitudes towards modernity and modernism, his place in the literary culture of the interwar period, and his pugnacious (mis)reading of literary and other texts. This study offers new exegetical accounts of the forms and figures of Waugh’s satire, linking original readings of Waugh’s texts to the literary-historical contexts that informed them. Posing fresh readings of familiar works and affording attention to more neglected texts, Evelyn Waugh’s Satire: Texts and Contexts offers readers and scholars a timely opportunity to return to the rich, dark art of this master of prose satire.

This set comprises 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 voulme set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

Arguing against the critical commonplace that Evelyn Waugh’s post-war fiction represents a decline in his powers as a writer, D. Marcel DeCoste offers detailed analyses of Waugh's major works from Brideshead Revisited to Unconditional Surrender. Rather than representing an ill-advised departure from his true calling as an iconoclastic satirist, DeCoste suggests, these novels form a cohesive, artful whole precisely as they explore the extent to which the writer’s and the Catholic’s vocations can coincide. For all their generic and stylistic diversity, these novels pursue a new, sustained exploration of Waugh’s art and faith both. As DeCoste shows, Waugh offers in his later works an under-remarked meditation on the dangers of a too-avid devotion to art in the context of modern secularism, forging in the second half of his career a literary achievement that both narrates and enacts a contrary, and Catholic, literary vocation.

In Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition, George McCartney argues that unlike traditional satirists, Evelyn Waugh was not primarily concerned with correcting morals and manners. Instead, he laid siege to the cultural and metaphysical assumptions of his time. McCartney demonstrates that the one constant in Waugh's work was his lively engagement with contemporary intellectual fashion. It was especially his response to modernism, the zeitgeist of his formative years, that gave his fiction its distinctive energy. McCartney shows how at every turn Waugh's writing pays parodic tribute to modernist esthetics. Although he deplored many of the movement's philosophical premises, he nevertheless admired its methods, borrowing them freely whenever it suited his purposes. In effect, Waugh developed an alternate modernism. Whether it was his playful reworking of Bauhaus and Futurist theory, or his borrowings from film technique, he was determined to take his place in what he called "the advance-guard" despite his avowedly "antique" tastes. Part aesthete, part traditionalist, he appropriated the strategies of experimental art in order to defeat its metaphysical implications. McCartney provides evidence that this ambivalent regard for modernism reveals not only Waugh's interest in aesthetics and philosophy, but also his personal conflicts. For a man who prized rationality, he was remarkably, even notoriously impulsive. McCartney concludes that Waugh's satire sprang not only from his dismay with contemporary intellectual fashions but also from an inward struggle between his orthodox and wayward selves, a struggle that registered the cultural conflicts of his time with uncanny accuracy. In McCartney's reading, Waugh's personal and intellectual ambivalence enabled him to become a prescient critic of our age. The result was a body of work that remains as vital today as when it was written.

English writer Evelyn Waugh was an expert satirist and an accomplished novelist; Evelyn Waugh was the second son of the late Arthur Waugh, publisher and literary critic, and brother Alec Waugh, the famous novelist. He was educated at Lancing and Hertford College, Oxford, where he read Modern History. In 1927 published his first work, a life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and in 1928 his first novel, Decline, and Fall, which was an immediate success. He spent the next nine years without abode, traveling in most parts of Europe, the near east, Africa, and tropical America. In 1939 he was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to Horse Guards. His best-known books before Brideshead Revisited were A Handful of Dust, a novel, and Edmund Campion. In 1942 he published Put Out More Flags, and then in 1945, Brideshead Revisited, When the Going was Good, The Loved One, Preceded Men at War, which came out in 1952 as the first volume in the Sword of Honor Trilogy and won the James Trial Black Prize. The Other Volumes, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender were published in 1955 and 1961. In 1964 he published A little Learning, the first volume of an autobiography. Evelyn Waugh was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1930, and his earlier biography of Elizabethan Jesuit Martyr Edmund Campion was awarded the Hawthorne Prize in 1936.

A study guide for Evelyn Waugh's "Handful of Dust", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students series. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.