Bloomsbury Books in London has announced the upcoming issuance of two new books with substantive Waugh content. The first is entitled the Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives. This has the following article relating to the archives of Evelyn Waugh:
‘Will Future Editor Kindly Omit…’: Evelyn Waugh in Conversation with his Archives, Barbara Cooke (Loughborough University, UK) and Naomi Milthorpe (University of Tasmania, Australia)
Both authors are well known to the EWS community and have presented several papers and articles as well as books relating to Waugh’s works. Here is Bloomsbury’s description of the book:
Archival work in modernist studies has revolutionised the discipline in the past two decades, fuelled by innovative and ambitious scholarly editing projects and a growing interest in fresh types of archival sources and evidence that can re-contextualise modernist writing. Several theoretical trends have prompted this development, including the focus on compositional process within genetic manuscript studies, the emphasis on book history, little magazines, and wider publishing contexts, and the emphasis on new material evidence and global and ‘non-canonical’ authors and networks within the ‘New Modernist Studies’.
This book provides a guide to the variety of new archival research that will point to fresh avenues and connect the methodologies and resources being developed across modernist studies. Offering a variety of single-author case studies on recent archival developments and editing projects, including Samuel Beckett, Hart Crane, H.D., James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf, it also offers a range of thematic essays that examine an array of underused sources as well as the challenges facing archival researchers of modernism.
The Handbook will be published in July and will appear in digital format only: Ebook (PDF).
The second book will follow in August and is written by James A W Heffernan. It is entitled Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II. This book will appear in hardback, paperback and digital formats. Here’s the description and Table of Contents (emphasis added):
Mining the borderlands where history meets literature in Britain and Europe as well as America, this book shows how the imminence and outbreak of World War II ignited the imaginations of writers ranging from Ernest Hemingway, W.H. Auden, and James Joyce to Bertolt Brecht, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, and Irène Némirovsky.
Taking its cue from Percy Shelley’s dictum that great writers are to some extent created by the age in which they live, this book shows how much the politics and warfare of the years from 1939 to 1941 drove the literature of this period. Its novels, poems, and plays differ radically from histories of World War II because-besides being works of imagination– they are largely products of a particular stage in the author’s life as well as of a time at which no one knew how the war would end.
This is the first comprehensive study of the impact of the outbreak of the Second World War on the literary work of American, English, and European writers during its first years.
Table of Contents
Prologue: History and Literature
1. Hitler, FDR, and the Partisan Review in 1939
2. The Spanish Civil War and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls
3. Prague after Munich: The Plight of Refugees in Martha Gellhorn’s A Stricken Field
4. Jan Karski, Patrick Hamilton, and W.H. Auden: Variations on September 1, 1939:
5. Bertolt Brecht, The Svendborg Poems-with a Side Glance at
James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
6. The Invasion of Poland and Brecht’s Mother Courage
7. The Phony War and Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags
8. Exodus and Occupation in Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française
9. War, Fire, and Sex: The London Blitz in Henry Green’s Caught
Epilogue
