Honors Project--Smith College, Northampton, Mass., 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 84-85).

Thesis--University of Wisconsin--Madison. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 347-352).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1969. / Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

Thesis--Université de Rennes II, 1975. / Includes indexes. Includes bibliographical references (p. 379-399).

Thesis (B.A.Hons.) University of Adelaide, Dept. of History, 1969.

Thèse--Lettres. / Bibliogr. p. 379-399 . Index.

I have examined Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited by reading it as a tragedy and looking at the motif of the tragic fall of the Marchmain family as a response to the challenges of modernity. Most academic works on Brideshead Revisited are religious readings that focus on the role of Catholicism in the narrative. I argue that the novel portrays modernity and as such, calls for the necessity of being able to change with the times. Approaching the narrative as a tragedy highlights this interpretation and allows for an exploration of the characters’ attitudes to modernity through their tragic fall. I have investigated the role and implications of tragedy in modern secular times and applied it to Brideshead Revisited, focusing on the Aristotelian theory of tragedy and employing Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s understanding of tragic action to explain the effect of the tragic fall on the spectator or reader. The Marchmains can be seen as Aristotelian tragic heroes that experience a fall due to their mistaken views that are founded on tradition and thus distance them from the modern world. The fall of the Marchmains and the looming disintegration of their social stratum are indicative of broader social change in interwar. For Charles Ryder, the narrator of Brideshead Revisited, the Marchmains’ tragic fall serves as a tool that allows him to see life from a different perspective and reconcile nostalgia and modernity. Brideshead Revisited is therefore not only a Catholic novel, but also a detailed image of interwar England, the shifts in its social structure, and the importance of accepting change.

No description available.

Systems of Order: The satirical novels of Evelyn Waugh is a study of Evelyn Waugh’s satire. It offers a contextual reading of eleven works by Waugh, presenting revisionist readings of familiar novels and according attention to previously neglected works. It aims to sketch out the main features of Waugh’s satire, including Waugh’s lexis and the use of certain key images and motifs. Comparative analysis of Waugh’s satirical novels with works by contemporary writers such as Clough Williams-Ellis, Wyndham Lewis, Stella Gibbons and T.S. Eliot brings into sharp relief the techniques and targets of Waugh’s satire. ¶ This thesis argues that despite Waugh’s tongue-in-cheek denial of satire’s efficacy in a complacent modern world, he did indeed write satire of a peculiarly twentieth century kind. Waugh’s apparently anarchic novels reflect, behind the detached insouciance of their narrators, the moral standards which the novels ostensibly claim are absent in the modern world. ¶ In Waugh’s writing, satire is effected through the creation of systems of literary order. The structure and patterning of his novels, and his masterful use of the rhetorical techniques of satire, mete out punishment on a formal level. Waugh’s satirical novels dramatize the tension between truth, order and civilization, and their oppositions, disorder and barbarism. Systems of Order suggests that from the very first, Waugh’s satiric project aimed toward the repudiation of modern disorder.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 1973. / Submitted to the Dept. of English. Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;