The University of Southern California has posted an illustrated copy of Naomi Milthorpe’s 2016 article “A Secret House: Evelyn Waugh’s Book Collection”. Naomi teaches at the University of Tasmania and is a longtime member of the Evelyn Waugh Society. This article first appeared in the journal The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945 published by USC. See previous post. Here’s the abstract:
This article examines Evelyn Waugh’s private library, reading his habits of book collection as a particular mode of late modernist practice. In private and public writing particularly during the Second World War, Waugh the book collector is simultaneously consumer, producer, and cultural combatant. Indeed, Waugh’s collection practices parallel his satiric practices: both satire and collection are guided by the impulse to discriminate, connoting both the pejorative and elitist senses of exclusion, but also selection, deliberation, and distinction. Waugh’s careful assemblage of a library at odds with mainstream literary culture proffers a striking case study of the contested cultural landscape of England in the space between, and after, the two world wars.
The full article is freely available at this link without registration. The text and illustrations are very handsomely presented on the internet. I couldn’t say when it was posted, but if you haven’t read it previously, it is well worth a look.
