The Character of Evelyn Waugh. Catholicism Clashed with Atheism

Academic Paper from the year 2019 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 5.0, , language: English, abstract: The aim of the hereby paper is to present the character of Evelyn Waugh. His career as a journalist was truncated as a direct result of his literary success with his first novel, Decline and Fall. Although his racy novels of the 'Bright Young People' in 1920s England made his reputation, he was a profoundly conservative writer who also had great success with more sombre works like Brideshead Revisited. Waugh's attitudes towards the marriage, faith, Catholicism and the aristocracy were very complex, and they changed over the years. I have tried to demonstrate the shape of these changes by tracing references to these themes in Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Brideshead Revisited, as he stated, is the account of the intervention of God's Grace in a family. When Brideshead was first published in 1945 it dismayed some critics and readers. It might be shocking that in fact so little they realised what the novel is really about. They thought it an excuse for aristocratic snobbery, suspected it to be sycophantic praise of a small Catholic clique, and condemned it for pandering to an unhealthy taste for miracles. Fifteen years after writing the novel, Waugh declared that he sees many faults in the book and he thought it necessary to excuse himself by the fact that he wrote it seduced by a consequent post-war nostalgia , nevertheless, at the time he wrote the novel, however, he had no doubt he was writing something of utmost importance. Better than anyone Waugh knew that it deals with far more than an age which witnessed a regrettable decline in splendid living. Its major theme - the need to place one's relationship with God at the very centre of one's life - is something very different. Moreover, the following paper intends to analyse the two approaches to the world of faith, namely - Catholicism and Atheism in order to find the reasons behind the common between 1890s and 1950s conversions to Catholicism, especially amongst the poets, artists and writers.