Academic literature on the topic 'Evelyn Waugh, satire, English literature 20th Century'

Systems of Order: The satirical novels of Evelyn Waugh is a study of Evelyn Waugh’s satire. It offers a contextual reading of eleven works by Waugh, presenting revisionist readings of familiar novels and according attention to previously neglected works. It aims to sketch out the main features of Waugh’s satire, including Waugh’s lexis and the use of certain key images and motifs. Comparative analysis of Waugh’s satirical novels with works by contemporary writers such as Clough Williams-Ellis, Wyndham Lewis, Stella Gibbons and T.S. Eliot brings into sharp relief the techniques and targets of Waugh’s satire. ¶ This thesis argues that despite Waugh’s tongue-in-cheek denial of satire’s efficacy in a complacent modern world, he did indeed write satire of a peculiarly twentieth century kind. Waugh’s apparently anarchic novels reflect, behind the detached insouciance of their narrators, the moral standards which the novels ostensibly claim are absent in the modern world. ¶ In Waugh’s writing, satire is effected through the creation of systems of literary order. The structure and patterning of his novels, and his masterful use of the rhetorical techniques of satire, mete out punishment on a formal level. Waugh’s satirical novels dramatize the tension between truth, order and civilization, and their oppositions, disorder and barbarism. Systems of Order suggests that from the very first, Waugh’s satiric project aimed toward the repudiation of modern disorder.

In the reading of the servants in examples from the period 1920-1950, the servant question is invoked to expose the workings of class. The servants in these narratives of Bowen, Green, Taylor, Waugh, Mansfield and Panter-Downes, lady’s maids, housekeepers, nannies, a butler and a chauffeur, are in thrall to the collective structures of societal ordering, and reluctant with respect to social mobility. Class was not fully being negotiated in this period, in fact little change was visible. Fer example intimacy, such as that between the lady’s maid and her mistress, meant that class confrontation was unlikely. The nanny showed that culturally constructed mechanisms such as nostalgia could be employed to discourage the desire for change. In terms of the socio-historical context any transformation in the make-up of domestic life – that is, the move towards homes without servants - was a fairly gradual business. But, there was a widespread belief in a change that had not really taken place – and that certainly had not taken place within domestic service. Any transformation of society was superficial; the governing ranks would not permit their disempowerment through genuine class change. I contend that the literature supports this perspective. Servants desire subservience; they find comfort in the familiarity of the system of household ranking-by-status. In the process, authority itself is portrayed as being less immutable, more malleable and thereby equipped for the future. In this sense the narratives read in this thesis go to make up a literature of resistance, in refutation of the overwhelming narrative of the time, progressing instead the notion that class must persist with its boundaries intact, as its hegemony is desirable and necessary for the smooth, successful operation of society.

'Systems of Order: The satirical novels of Evelyn Waugh' is a study of Evelyn Waugh’s satire. It offers a contextual reading of eleven works by Waugh, presenting revisionist readings of familiar novels and according attention to previously neglected works. It aims to sketch out the main features of Waugh’s satire, including Waugh’s lexis and the use of certain key images and motifs. Comparative analysis of Waugh’s satirical novels with works by contemporary writers such as Clough Williams-Ellis, Wyndham Lewis, Stella Gibbons and T.S. Eliot brings into sharp relief the techniques and targets of Waugh’s satire. ¶ This thesis argues that despite Waugh’s tongue-in-cheek denial of satire’s efficacy in a complacent modern world, he did indeed write satire of a peculiarly twentieth century kind. Waugh’s apparently anarchic novels reflect, behind the detached insouciance of their narrators, the moral standards which the novels ostensibly claim are absent in the modern world. ¶ In Waugh’s writing, satire is effected through the creation of systems of literary order. The structure and patterning of his novels, and his masterful use of the rhetorical techniques of satire, mete out punishment on a formal level. Waugh’s satirical novels dramatize the tension between truth, order and civilization, and their oppositions, disorder and barbarism. 'Systems of Order' suggests that from the very first, Waugh’s satiric project aimed toward the repudiation of modern disorder.