English
College of Professional Studies
Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition,
2nd Edition
Publisher: Transaction Publications
New Brunswick, NJ
2003, 191 pages
This study considers the formative influences on Evelyn Waugh’s
fiction, arguing that his satire sprang from the conflict between
his esthetic tastes and his philosophical convictions. He
cultivated an ambivalent regard for modernist art which led him to
enlist the movement’s esthetic techniques in the cause of defeating
its ideological implications. This apparent contradiction reflected
a lifelong personal struggle between his wayward and orthodox
selves. This struggle may have undermined his emotional stability
but it also enabled him to register the cultural trends of the 20th
century with uncanny prescience.
“In a complex, intelligently argued volume McCartney recognizes
Waugh’s conservative, traditionalist view of modernity and his
distaste for the age of the common man. However, he also recognizes
in the writing a willingness to use the tools of modernity in an
often playful, but always artful, manner.”
– The Year’s Work in English Studies