Evelyn Waugh- the Novelist

Prof. Jagdish Chandra Jha

Description

Evelyn Waugh was an author of rare sensitivity. He could laugh at himself and share the suffering of entire humanity. And, the book reflects it all..
By- Krishna & Anil
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.

Sujets

• Biographical
• Evelyn Waugh
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 02 février 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781663239327
• Langue: English

Extrait

Evelyn Waugh- The Novelist
 
 
 
 
 
Prof. Jagdish Chandra Jha
 
 
 

 
EVELYN WAUGH- THE NOVELIST
 
 
Copyright © 2023 Prof. Jagdish Chandra Jha.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
 
 
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ISBN: 978-1-6632-3930-3 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-3931-0 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-3932-7 (e)
 
 
 
iUniverse rev. date: 02/01/2023
CONTENTS
Chapter 1Introduction
Chapter 2The Rootless Generation
Chapter 3The Conflict of Civilization and Barbarism
Chapter 4Faith and Fiction
Chapter 5Later Satirical Novels
Chapter 6Portrait of the Artist
Chapter 7The War Trilogy
Chapter 8Conclusions
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 
 
 
 
I acknowledge my late wife, Madhuri Devi Jha, who inspired me to complete my Ph.D. and encouraged me throughout my journey. My special thanks to Prof. R.K Sinha for his guidance throughout the Ph.D. program. I’m lucky to have three daughters and two sons. Neerja, my youngest daughter, motivated me to get my Ph.D. thesis on Evelyn Waugh published. Furthermore, many-many thanks to my entire Big family and Friends for their love and for uplifting me daily.
- Prof. Jagdish Chandra Jha
 
Evelyn Waugh was an author of unusual sensitivity. He could laugh at himself, often unsparingly, and also share the suffering of humanity in its entirety. The book by Dr. J. C. Jha reflects it all with rare brilliance. It is pure bliss for us all that the book would be published soon...
-Krishna & Anil
The book is an insightful and well-crafted depiction of one of the most influential prose stylists of the 20 th century. Dr. Jha’s thoughtful review of Evelyn Waugh’s work helps preserve, for posterity, the finest form of human art.
- Jose Rodriguez
 
My special tribute to my Philosopher, satiric genius, Father Prof. J.C. Jha on his 90 th Birthday!!
- Neerja
CHAPTER I Introduction
Evelyn Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall, was published in 1928; Unconditional Surrender , the last volume of his war-trilogy, which was also his last novel, appeared in 1961. His career as a novelist covers the most crowded decades of modern history. The social and cultural background, too, as mirrored by his novels, extends from the 1920s to the 1950s. These decades were one of the most turbulent and revolutionary periods in the modern history of England and Europe and his novels vividly express the mood of the time and the spirit of the age; they provide a startling insight into the social and cultural background of the times and link him up with the contemporary situation. It is essential, therefore, for a proper understanding of his novels to take into account the historical, social and intellectual perspective of the period.
The First World War was a great historical catastrophe which marked the end of an era that had begun in the wake of the French Revolution. It was a traumatic event, leading to disintegration of economic, political, social and moral institutions and their codes. In the beginning it had evoked excitement and euphoria, but disenchantment had rapidly set in; and the realisation came that it was the beginning of the great crisis ahead. The war gravely split the landscape of time, making an unbridgeable cleavage between the past and the present. It dissolved well-established boundaries and blew up the familiar landmarks that had been taken for granted. The gulf between the young, who fought in the war, and the old, who stayed at home, widened. All British assumptions about the superiority of their system and the stability of their empire were exposed as illusions. While capitalism was entering a phase of acute crisis, the start of a new system of Socialism appeared on the horizon after the Russian Revolution of 1917. The war emancipated the women and the working-class, and brought on the agenda the urgency of social and political change. It made the motorcar and the aeroplane commonplace. It affected everything and everybody in a revolutionary way and at the end of it nothing was as it had been before. “The catastrophe of the First World War not only altered society, it affected men’s sensibilities as they had not previously been affected in modern times. The catastrophe brought into modern society a sense of urgency and a new tempo; it made for a new consciousness of self and of the place of the self in society; it created an atmosphere in which the loss of old certainties, the presence of new anxieties, and the thrusting forward of public issues combined to isolate man from man and group from group. The novelist promptly discovered that new techniques were required to express the new fragmentation of society”. 1
The years immediately preceding and following the First World War coincided with great creative experiments and innovations. As Wyndham Lewis says: “we were not the only people with something to be proud about at that time. Europe was full of titanic stirrings and snortings – a new art coming to flower to celebrate or to announce a ‘new age’” 2 In 1910 Poger Fry organised the first exhibition at the Grafton Gallery of the post-Impressionist paintings and a second exhibition in 1912 – the earliest organised introduction to the paintings of Van Gogh, Paul Ganguin and Paul Cezanne. The next startling development in arts was Pablo Picasso’s cubism. The first manifesto of Futurism had been issued by F.T. Marinetti in 1909. In 1913 G. Apollinaire published a manifesto called ‘The Futurist Anti-Tradition’ (L’Anti-Tradizione Futurista) in the curt imperative manner already adopted by Marinetti. Expressionism was the German contribution to the world of art. The war-years fostered the emergence of Dadaism and Surrealism. The first manifesto of Vorticism appeared in the first number of Blast in 1914. The phrase, ‘Vorticism’, invented by Ezra Pound, had been taken up by the more militant Wyndham Lewis; and T.E. Hulme, a pupil of Henri Bergson, provided a philosophical background to the movement. Hulme’s concept of ‘a period of hard, dry, classical verse’ encouraged Ezra Pound to initiate another movement in poetry called Imagism and provided a basis for T.S. Eliot’s idea of ‘tradition and individual talent’. Pound and Eliot had already started these daring experiments in verse in the pre-war years, although it was in the post-war period that the culmination occurred in the Cantos and The Waste Land . In fiction James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers were pre-war experiments achieving their fulfilment at the end of the War in Ulysses and Women in Love . Ulysses was a seminal work and led Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein towards further experiments in fiction.
During the 1920s, people of England tried to recover from the shocks and strains of the war, but their attempts, instead, led them to a muddle of escapism, hedonism and cynicism. It was an era of revolt, violence, frivolity, exhibitionism, pervasive skepticism and neuroticism. The cult of ‘youth’ and ‘freedom’, particularly freedom of sexual behaviour, was so widespread and dominating that a very small group of Bright Young People secured a great deal of publicity by throwing wild parties and indulging in outrages and orgies of sex, drinking, ragging and drugging. The younger generation suffered from a sense of loneliness, isolation and aimlessness; for them it was a period of doubt, uncertainty and confusion. Religion was losing its hold on them, creating an atmosphere of moral and psychological perplexity and chaos. As there was nothing stable for an individual outside of himself to hang on to, he drifted into a void of immeasurable dimensions.
The upper classes were losing their supremacy and political dominance; there was a sense of uneasiness and apprehension among them as the lower middle-classes and the working-class were coming up and exerting themselves to share political power. Class distinctions and stratifications were getting blurred due to immense increase in social mobility. Struggle for a status based on education instead of birth became a characteristic feature of the period. The Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression of the late twenties, that led to economic chaos, serious unemployment and poverty, deepened the crisis in Europe as well as in America.
In the intellectual field the works of Marx, Shaw and the Fabians on the one hand, and of Bergson, William James, Freud and Jung, on the other, discovered new ideas or gave new interpretations to existing ideas, exploring unknown regions and explaining the meaning and significance of the contemporary situation. Like the Marxist interpretation revolutionised human thinking in the field of political economy, Freudian interpretation through the study of human psychology of the sub-conscious and unconscious gave a new direction to concepts about human personality a