Children in modernist literature have been largely ignored in critical study; an odd oversight, since children in Victorian and contemporary literature have been sources of rich material for literary critics. In novels published from 1930 until 1934, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, and Evelyn Waugh address the relationships between children/childhood and nostalgia in The Apes of God (Lewis), The Waves (Woolf), and A Handful of Dust (Waugh). Their complicated and often conflicting depictions of childhood and desire for the past reveal children's overlooked importance in British modernism, as well as a lack of singularity in the manifestations of children and nostalgia that is crucial to contemporary understandings of both terms.

Proefschrift Universiteit van Amsterdam. / Met lit. opg. - Met samenvatting in het Engels.

Zugl.: Vechta, Hochsch., Diss., 2004

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An analysis on Evelyn Waugh's novels: Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, and Vile Bodies as well as their film and television adaptations. The paper relates all of these works to Waugh's idea that the true value and reason why students should attend university is not because their degree will earn them a massive salary, but because it allows for another four years of sequestered development away from adult society. Waugh stated that the true value of his time as an undergraduate at Oxford was because it provided him with the opportunity to drink, throw parties, discover art, etc...which therefore gave him an appropriate amount of time to grow up gradually. All of these novels, films, and television series provide substantial evidence as to why Waugh's point was correct and is still valid.

This thesis is an examination of how the themes of adultery and regeneration are interwoven and explored by selected English novelists in the first half of the twentieth century. It is essential to establish that Ford, Lawrence, Waugh and Greene do not adhere to the ‘archetypal' pattern of the adultery novel established in the nineteenth century and, in fact, turn that pattern on its head. Ford's The Good Soldier and Parade's End provide two differing perspectives. The first uses adultery as a metaphor for the disintegration of English society, mirroring the social disintegration that accompanied the First World War; Parade's End, however, presents an adulterous relationship as being a regenerative force in the post-war society. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover also uses an adulterous relationship as a means of addressing the need for social, and national, regeneration in the inter-war years. Waugh's A Handful of Dust presents a woman's adultery as the ruin of not only a good man, but also civilisation in general; Brideshead Revisited is more religious in tone and traces the spiritual regeneration of its central character, whose conversion, ironically, is made possible through his adulterous relationship. Similarly, Greene's The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair portray the process of spiritual regeneration; in both novels this movement towards salvation is intertwined with an exploration of adulterous love. The ultimate question probed in this thesis is how the twentieth century novel of adultery overturns the traditional literary approach to the subject. Adulterous unions and illegitimate children are no longer presented as being exclusively socially destabilising or subversive in these novels; most intriguingly significant is that, in some of these novels, the illegitimate child becomes a symbol of hope, and, indeed, of regeneration.

The modern soundscape buzzes with noise. In the 1930s, telephones, radios, and gramophones filled domestic spaces with technological noise, while crowds shouting in the streets created political clamour. During the war in the 1940s, bombs and sirens broke through buildings and burst through consciousness. This dissertation examines the response of three British modernist writers to the cultural shifts brought about by technology and politics, which altered everyday experience and social relations. Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh, and George Orwell represent noise in their fiction and nonfiction as a trope of power. Noise, as a palpable emblem of discontent and the acoustic unconsciousness of the period, infiltrates sentences and rearranges syntax, as in the invention of Newspeak in Nineteen Eight-Four. Noise cannot leave listeners in a neutral position. The "culture racket" of the 1930s and 1940s required urgent new ways of listening and listening with ethical intent. / Chapter One provides a reading of Elizabeth Bowen's audible terrains in her novels of the 1930s, where silences and sudden noises intrude on human lives. In Bowen's novels, technological noise has both comedic and tragic consequences. Chapter Two examines noise as a political signifier in The Heat of the Day, Bowen's novel of the blitz. Chapter Three takes up the significance of the culture racket to Evelyn Waugh's novels and travel writing of the 1930s; noise assumes a disruptive, if highly comedic, value in his works, an ambiguity that expresses what it means to be modern. Chapter Four examines Waugh's penchant for satirizing the phoneyness of contemporary culture---its political vacillations---especially in Put Out More Flags, set during the Second World War. Chapter Five considers Orwell's engagement with the emerging social and political formations amongst working, racial, and warring classes in the 1930s. Documenting noise in his reportage, Orwell sounds alarms to alert readers to the mounting social and political crises in his realist novels of the decade. Chapter Six argues that Orwell's final two novels of the 1940s, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, represent the politics of noise in as much as they announce the noise of politics in totalitarian futures. Noise demarcates the insidiousness of propaganda as it screeches from telescreens, the keynote in Big Brother's ideological symphony of domination. Noise, throughout Orwell's writing, signifies the struggle for power. In its widest ramifications, noise provides an interpretive paradigm through which to read Bowen's, Waugh's, and Orwell's fiction and non-fiction, as well as modernist texts generally.

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This dissertation aims to provide an insight into English country house fiction by twentieth and twenty-first century authors, such as E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch, Alan Hollinghurst, and Sarah Waters. The variety of literary depictions of the country house reflects the physical diversification of the buildings in question, from smaller variants to formerly grand residences on the brink of physical collapse. The country house is explored within the wider social and cultural contexts of the period, including contemporary architectural development. Given the exceptionally evocative and integrating properties that the influential theories of Martin Heidegger and Gaston Bachelard attribute to a house in general, it is unsurprising that the concept of the country house has inspired discussion of such a wide spectrum of topics. Its unique centring quality is echoed in the dense intertextuality prominently marking its literary representations, and enables the successful implementation of various temporal idiosyncrasies, which often set the house apart from the habitual passing of time. Within the scope of contemporary fiction, architecture and poetics of space, the country house accentuates different conceptions of dwelling. Consequently, the literary portrayals of the country house can be...