Ashgate Publishing has announced the release later this week of a major study of Waugh’s later fiction. This is The Vocation of Evelyn Waugh: Faith and Art in the Post War Fiction. The book is by Marcel DeCoste, Associate Professor of English at Regina University in Saskatchewan, Canada, and an Associate Editor of Evelyn Waugh Studies. According to the publisher’s description:
Rather than representing an ill-advised departure from [Waugh’s] true calling as an iconoclastic satirist, DeCoste suggests, these [Post War] 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.
The book will be available from both Amazon and the publisher at a list price of £60.00/$104.95 . The publisher will offer a 20% discount (code C15JKW20) to Society members and others who were delegates to the recent conference at Leicester University and may be willing to extend that same discount to non-delegate members upon request.
