Evelyn Waugh (Writers and Their Work) - Hardcover

Pasternak-Slater, Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0746312040 ISBN 13: 9780746312049

Publisher: Liverpool University Press, 2016

Synopsis

Everyone knows how funny Evelyn Waugh is. One of his finest comic creations was his own increasingly rebarbative public persona - a self-confessed 'front of pomposity mitigated by indiscretion, that was as hard, bright and antiquated as a cuirass'. No wonder new biographies of Waugh are popular. The life and work cannot be separated. Gathered productively at the writer's desk are the chaotic and often bizarre details of Waugh's own life, what he called the 'adroit jigsaw' of his unobtrusively elegant aesthetic structures, and his moral coherence. This study shows how Waugh transformed his own experiences into painfully comic, brilliantly constructed novels. They are works, in his own words, of 'elegance and variety of contrivance'. Ann Pasternak Slater has written an ingenious and engaging study of the relationship between Waugh's life and work, between his sharp moral vision and Dionysiac comic genius. She focuses on Waugh's entire fictional oeuvre in a book notable for its intelligent sympathy.

About this title

About the Author:

Ann Pasternak-Slater is a Senior Research Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford. Previously she held the post of Eardley-Wilmot Tutor in English at St Anne’s College Oxford, where she specialised in Renaissance and Twentieth-Century Literature. A respected expert on Evelyn Waugh she is a member of the editorial advisory board for the forthcoming OUP 28 volume edition of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, as well as one of a panel of three Waugh experts for Radio 4’s In Our Time programme.

Review:

... a superb piece of work. It should become a classic, enduring study. It is limpidly, elegantly written...it manifests the author's remarkable insight and keen intelligence in every paragraph. (William Boyd)

About this edition

• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0746312040
• ISBN 13: 9780746312049
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 344