Bloomsbury Publishing has announced the publication of a new academic study of Waugh. This is entitled Evelyn Waugh’s Exterior Modernism: Cinema, Satire, Comedy and is written by Waugh Society member and co-editor of Evelyn Waugh Studies, Yuexi Liu. Here are the publisher’s description and the Table of Contents:
“Drawing on literary manuscripts and the history of cinema, Evelyn Waugh’s Exterior Modernism examines systematically for the first time Waugh’s relationship with cinema in the context of modernism, a relationship crucial to the emergence and development of his strand of modernism.
The term ‘exterior modernism’ refers to the work of a group of younger writers, such as Evelyn Waugh, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Green, Christopher Isherwood, Anthony Powell, Elizabeth Bowen, and Patrick Hamilton, whose departure from high modernism took the form of an ‘outward turn’ privileging exteriority over the interiority of consciousness through foregrounding talk and drawing on cinema, comedy, and satire. Relating to other exterior modernists, Evelyn Waugh’s Exterior Modernism focuses on Waugh by way of exemplification, considering his oeuvre, non-fiction as well as fiction. To illuminate Waugh’s exteriority, Yuexi Liu develops an interdisciplinary framework, informed primarily by distributed cognition.”
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction Exterior Modernist: The Outward Turn
1. ‘In my beginning is my end’: ‘The Balance’ and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
2. Cinema, Comedy, and Satire: Decline and Fall as a Chaplinesque Silent Film
3. Talk Fiction and the Group Novel: Vile Bodies as the Group Novel
4. Waugh’s Heritage: Brideshead Revisited and Adaptation
Conclusion: ‘In my end is my beginning’
Bibliography
The book is available 5 February in the UK in both hardback and digital versions. It is already on offer from Amazon.com in the US.
