Announcements of academic papers with Evelyn Waugh in their title for the calendar year 2022 are posted below. Where abstracts have been published with the title and source, these have been included:
–Guy Woodward, “Conducting his Own Campaigns: Evelyn Waugh and Propaganda”, The Review of English Studies, 2022-3, v. 73:
“This essay examines Evelyn Waugh as practitioner and critic in the field of wartime propaganda. In 1941, Waugh produced a fictitious account of a British Commando raid on German territory in North Africa for publication in Britain and the United States, an episode which reveals his skill as a propagandist, but also prompts scrutiny of his contacts with British propaganda agencies and agents and of the effect of propaganda on his writings. Waugh’s interwar fiction exhibits a sophisticated understanding of the evolving and growing power of modern propaganda, but the novels also anticipate the public relations and psychological warfare campaigns of the Second World War, specifically those carried out by the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), a secret service established in 1941 to produce and coordinate propaganda to enemy and occupied Europe. Waugh’s proximity to the PWE is suggested by a dense network of social and professional connections, and is further indicated by a series of references to the PWE and its work which I have uncovered in his fiction. Allusions to covert propaganda in Put Out More Flags and the Sword of Honour trilogy betray Waugh’s understanding of the PWE’s operations, but also provide a critique of the corrosive and unforeseen effects of information warfare waged by the secret state and offer a productive means of re-examining his much-noted anxieties regarding modernity and mid-century political change.”
–Paul McCallum, “Evelyn Waugh and the 18th Century: Satire and the Problem of Time,” The Midwest Quarterly (Pittsburgh), 2022-11, v. 64(1), pp. 74-94:
“The presence of … Enlightenment elements serves at least two main functions in Evelyn Waugh’s fiction. Most immediately, these relics serve as satirical counterpoint to the equivalents produced by the twentieth-century, an age of jazz, plastic, and Picasso. Moreover, they give Waugh’s characters and readers access to other times, other places, other present moments. They inscribe the past into the present, and in so doing establish a cultural, a civilizational continuity that in the early novels offsets the Alice-in-Wonderland-like mayhem, and in the later novels points up a condition of rapid, perhaps irreversible decline.”
–Martin Potter,”Transformations and Transfigurations:Britishness and Romanness across the epochs in Evelyn Waugh and David Jones,” University of Bucharest Review: Literary and Cultural Studies Series, 2022-2, v. XI/2009(2):
“For British twentieth-century Catholic-convert writers Evelyn Waugh and David Jones coming to terms with their place in a British identity was problematic, given the way that concepts of Britishness had been shaped with reference to Protestantism, and with an anti-Catholic slant, since the Reformation. Like other British Catholic writers they approached this difficulty creatively by looking into history and reintegrating older understandings of the culture of the island of Britain into their own sense of Britishness, understandings in which Catholicism was a formative element. In both cases their interest in early British times brought them to engage imaginatively with the phenomenon of the Roman Empire, and ideas of parallels between the Roman and British Empires, and between the Roman Empire and the Church, become important to them. Through consideration of Waugh’s novel Helena and his Sword of Honour trilogy, and David Jones’s volumes of poetic work In Parenthesis, The Anathemata and The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments I shall discuss and compare the elements of durability and of transience in Britishness and Romanness as these writers understand them, and suggest that especially in the case of Romanness the transformation they show is also a transfiguration.”
–Naomi Milthorpe, “‘The Twilight of Language’: The Young Evelyn Waugh on’Catherine’ Mansfield,” Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2022, pp. 21-34.
–Victoria Bilge Yilmaz, “Evelyn Waugh and Black Mischief as a Narrative of Failure,” IBAD Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 2022-8 (12), pp. 125-36:
“Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief (1932) has been accepted as one of the satiric novels of the 20th century English literature. Being Waugh’s third novel, Black Mischief includes a high concentration of satire and criticism through which the writer expresses his ideas on colonialism and the modern man in general. The novel is about an unsuccessful attempt at establishing a country in the heart of the oriental world. Seth, the Oxford-graduate emperor of a fictional Azania, fails to establish a correlation between the English-like Azania in his aspirations with the real cannibal-oriented country and its half-naked inhabitants. This study will analyze Waugh’s Black Mischief in terms of Frantz Fanon’s essay “On National Culture” (1959). A political philosopher and an intellectual from Martinique, Frantz Fanon has become highly influential in the discourse on colonialism and post-colonialism. His writing titled “On National Culture” outlines the steps to embrace the notion of national identity and national consciousness. This study will outline to what degree Waugh’s protagonist Seth fits into Fanon’s category of an endeavor to establish national culture. The study will conclude that Seth’s failure to establish his country heavily depends on the contemporary human conditions in the psychologically devastated universe.”
–Julie Labay Morère, “‘Voices at Play’ in Muriel Spark’s The Comforters and Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold,” Etudes britannique contemporaines 2022-9, v. 30, p. 83:
“In The Comforters and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, both published in 1957, two writers, Caroline Rose and the eponymous Gilbert Pinfold, suffer from aural hallucinations, just as Spark and Waugh did. The two authors have acknowledged the surprising similarities and echoes that link their works, but few studies have actually tried to go deeper into the dialogic approach initiated by Waugh in his review of The Comforters published in The Spectator (22 February 1957). My analysis will show how the voices that haunt the characters become a central element in the artistic creation. Exploring the limits of the autobiographical genre in relation with madness, the narrative voice blends other genres, intertextual references and metafictional elements, thus intensifying the plurivocal structure of the novels and unveiling the mechanisms of the texts, prefiguring post-modern theories.”
–Carlos Sanchez Fernandez, “Evelyn Waugh and Brideshead Revisited: Sites of Memory and Tradition”, Miscelánea, Departamento de FilologĂa Inglesa y Alemana–Universidad de Zaragoza, 2022-o6, v. 65, pp. 87-103:
“In this article, it is my intention to analyse two theoretical notions related to space, namely Pierre Nora’s idea of the site of memory and Gaston Bachelard’s thoughts on space and the house, as applied to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). I base my analysis on the symbolic value of the English country house with regard to the interwar English aristocracy and upper classes as depicted in this novel; that is, as a site of memory. I consider the point of view of three characters: Charles Ryder, the novel’s first-person narrator, Lord Sebastian Flyte, Ryder’s intimate friend, and Lord Marchmain, Sebastian’s father, who triggers the novel’s sudden and unexpected ending through his deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism, his family’s creed. My conclusion links the decline of aristocratic and Christian ideals with the disappearance of communities of memory and their traditions after the Second World War.” [Highlighting in original.]
Some of these papers may have been mentioned in previous posts where internet postings appeared at their time of publication. Anyone knowing of additional academic papers from 2022 with Waugh as a subject is invited to notify us by posting a comment.
