In:
Britain and the World, Edinburgh University Press, Vol. 5, No. 1 ( 2012-03), p. 43-68
Abstract:
Although most intellectual historians have left novels to their cultural colleagues, novels often illuminate the prevalent kinds of thought within historical periods. History, like fiction, is a narrative that constructs, reconstructs, and deconstructs meaning and novels, read by more people than any other kind of writing, can tell us what their readers prefer to think. This is most likely when authors with a serious purpose have access to an audience willing to take them seriously or at least to engage with them at some level of reflection. During the two tumultuous decades that followed the Great War, new varieties of fiction appeared that deliberately attempted to alter perceptions and reflection about unprecedented events. Among the avant garde, Evelyn Waugh was a new, satirical voice that shared anti-modernist, anti-technological attitudes with Elliot and Huxley, and a religious commitment with Tolkien. But he was unique among his contemporaries because of his trajectory through an exotic, far flung world, domestically and internationally. A reading of Waugh, in the context of his troubled times, reveals an adapter and propagator of ideas and pervasive mentalities shared by great numbers of people both within and without elites. His outrageous, misanthropic, bitterly cynical, very funny, relentlessly self-centered, anti-feminist, anti-Semitic and consistently best-selling novels attacked “modernity,” “progress,” and the possibility of reform. Repudiating liberal and socialist ideals, Waugh reflected and endorsed a conservative, traditionalist, and by the 1940s, a Roman Catholic alternative among the new ideas stridently clamoring for attention. Especially in those novels and occasional essays meant to influence opinion, written from Decline and Fall in 1928 through Brideshead Revisited in 1944, Waugh represented newly asserted and contested thinking about free will, determinism, religious and secular obligation, tradition, social status, and morality.
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
ISSN:
2043-8567
,
2043-8575
DOI:
10.3366/brw.2012.0034
Language:
English
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press
Publication Date:
2012
Bookmarklink
