The Vocation of Evelyn Waugh
Subtitle: Faith and Art in the Post-War Fiction
Publisher: Routledge
Published: May 29, 2015
Language: eng
Format: hardcover
Number of pages: 196
ISBN-13: 9781409470847
Description: 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.
Notes: Source title: The Vocation of Evelyn Waugh: Faith and Art in the Post-War Fiction