Pasted in each of the 3500-odd volumes of Evelyn Waugh's personal book collection he... more Pasted in each of the 3500-odd volumes of Evelyn Waugh's personal book collection held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRC) at the University of Texas at Austin, is a bookplate. By far the most frequent is what HRC librarian Richard Oram has termed the "armorial" bookplate, comprising the Waugh family crest and motto, Industria Ditat (Industry Enriches). This bookplate, adapting the crest and motto from his father's armorial plate (which itself appears on many of the volumes inherited from Arthur Waugh), was engraved in June 1943 by an engraver named Osmond. There is a bookplate which seems to appear only once, in a history of the Danish firm Peter P. Heering; the "ex libris" plate seems to be one used by the firm for presentation copies of the book. By far the most interesting of the bookplates, which appears with great frequency in books published in the twenties, Oram has termed Waugh's "modernist" bookplate: "Although it is not known when Waugh actually designed and began using this plate, it seems in style and spirit to belong to the early 1920s. Only a handful of earlierbooks from'Waugh's librarybear it." The plate is printed in red and black script on a white ground. Pour marginal panels, with text adapted from the marriage service, read "for better for worse / for richer for poorer / to love and to cherish / in sickness and in health;" these panels surround a central panel which proclaims: "Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh His Book".
Festivity has long been a central concern of literary critics wishing to track the formal, social... more Festivity has long been a central concern of literary critics wishing to track the formal, social, and cultural relation of literature and play. In accounts from Bakhtin onwards, carnival excess fosters renewal of the social realm. Yet the “festive vision” of restoration and rebirth offered by a Bakhtinian critique fails to account for the divergent nature of party literature in the period after World War I. During the interwar period, satirical novels from both sides of the Atlantic represented the decay of modern sociability. When play is transformed into work, a carnival vision becomes untenable; the party is no longer a source of social, emotional, or sacral renewal, but instead the site of what Sianne Ngai has theorized as ugly feelings. In representative novels by Anthony Powell and Carl Van Vechten, disgust and boredom, rather than pleasure and interest, dominate the festive landscape.
The tension between precisions and generalities that catches scholars seeking to define the chara... more The tension between precisions and generalities that catches scholars seeking to define the character of literary modernism fruitfully animates the work of novelist Henry Green. Green takes as his subject matter the ordinary stuff of life—commonplace language, routine experiences, unremarkable relationships—transforming dullness into novelistic event. Two novels demonstrate Green's extraordinary effects achieved through and with the banal, the boring, the vague, and the everyday: Party Going (1939) and Nothing (1951). In Party Going, a group of people stranded at a train station wait with their luggage, order drinks, and lose and find various members of their party. In its attention to the bathetic quotidian, Party Going animates a range of late modernist anxieties about time, leisure, and subjective experience that manifest in the novel's fretful leveling of objects and experiences using the repeated, vague signifier things. Later, in Nothing, a group of socialites—a young couple, their parents, who were former lovers, and the parents’ lovers—have conversations in restaurants and pubs. Nothing dramatizes the inane nature of polite conversation, in which “-thing” is used as a block, as though to empty a conversation of significant information. The multiple subjects and objects embraced by the vague term things suggests that Green's fiction is preoccupied with the “utter contingency of everything (and every thing)” in the modernist period, as Douglas Mao notes. In these novels’ recourse to the any, some, every, or no things of the quotidian, Green explores the potential difference, remarkable sameness, and fuzzy difficulty of late modernist style.
Waugh is a perennial subject for literary scholars; most studies published in the past thirty yea... more Waugh is a perennial subject for literary scholars; most studies published in the past thirty years take a strongly biographical approach, using Waugh’s life and faith as lenses through which to critique the fiction. Evelyn Waugh’s Satire takes a different approach: using frameworks of modernist studies, intertextuality, satire theory, and the contexts of the interwar period, Milthorpe renews debates about the targets and tactics of Waugh’s satire.
"Basil Seal Rides Again" was English novelist Evelyn Waugh's last published work of... more "Basil Seal Rides Again" was English novelist Evelyn Waugh's last published work of fiction. The subtitle of this 1963 short story, "The Rake's Regress," indicates not only return but also re-entry into a place of origin, a regression to the satirical mode Waugh had seemingly laid to rest with the publication of the Sword of Honour trilogy and the beginnings of his autobiographical reminiscences in A Little Learning. In 1962 Waugh set aside his memoir (itself a return to youth) to "recapture," he writes in the dedicatory letter to Mrs. Ian Fleming, the satirical mode, and many of the characters, of his earlier writing ("Basil Seal" [1963] 485). Waugh's return to these characters, in particular Basil Seal and Ambrose Silk, reignites his ambivalent animation of the competing attractions of convention and iconoclasm, attractions which seem implicitly allied to motifs of age and youth. Rather than fading into twilight, Basil Seal "at 60" (Waugh, Letters 593) embarks on one last racket, stripping away the weight of "worldly-wise moralities" ("Basil Seal" 503) to once more rule in what Put Out More Flags described as an "obstreperous minority of one" (54). "Basil Seal Rides Again" is significant not merely because it is Waugh's last work of fiction and his last work of satire, but also because it enacts a satirical rejection of the soft, sad resignation of old age. This short work has received little critical attention. Like 1957's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, the extant criticism of "Basil Seal Rides Again" centers on biographical coincidences with Waugh's own life. Douglas Lane Patey notes that publication of the story of Basil at sixty was delayed, "in an act of self-punishing irony," to coincide with Waugh's own sixtieth birthday, remarking that Basil is "transparently Waugh himself: prematurely aged at sixty, fat, deaf, short of breath" (359). Robert Murray Davis notes Waugh's "autobiographical impulse," seeing Waugh's "own feelings for his daughter Margaret" in the crypto-incestuous relationship between Basil and his daughter (122). Biographical parallels are enticing (especially given Kathleen Hale's frontispiece to the Chapman & Hall limited edition, featuring a Basil Seal visually reminiscent of Waugh at 60) (1.) and can in certain instances be discomfortingly revealing. It is crucial, however, that the story receives a more thorough critical evaluation of its aims, achievements, and complexities as Waugh's final work of satire. The story opens on "two stout, rubicund, richly dressed old buffers" (490) disapprovingly discussing the theft of a set of shirts by a young man, Charles Albright, romantically involved with one of their daughters. The two "old buffers" are Basil Seal and Peter Pastmaster, two of Waugh's earliest creations. Basil--the rogue who stole his mother's emeralds in Black Mischief and exploited Ambrose Silk in Put Out More Flags--and Peter, the pretty young aristocrat of Decline and Fall, are now respected members of an aging generation. Basil and Peter are attending a dinner to celebrate Ambrose's birthday, along with the twinned poets Parsnip and Pimpernell and the aged publisher Mr Bentley, all characters previously seen in Put Out More Flags (and, in Parsnip's case, in the dystopian future of Love Among the Ruins, attempting to access state-funded suicide). The world that Waugh returns to in "Basil Seal Rides Again" has changed utterly, as have its inhabitants. It is the early sixties, and Ambrose, exiled to Ireland for supposed fifth-column fascism in the wartime world of Put Out More Flags, is now the literary status quo, receiving the Order of Merit (Waugh himself refused the CBE2). Basil, following his marriage to Angela Lyne, has "settled into the orderly round of the rich," exchanging the raffish clubs of his youth, Bratt's and Bellamy's, for "that sombre club in Pall Mall that had been the scene of so many painful interviews with his self-appointed guardian, Sir Joseph Mannering" (493). …
Merry Hall, the bestselling 1951 gardening book by the journalist, novelist and bright-young-thin... more Merry Hall, the bestselling 1951 gardening book by the journalist, novelist and bright-young-thing Beverley Nichols (1898–1983), offers opportunities for queering the historical period of post-Second World War austerity, and the cultural practices associated with it. In reading this book we can uncover the anti-austerity utopia sheltered in his Georgian country-house garden. In this chapter I offer a preliminary close reading of this charming and under-read book, and seek to enter contemporary debates about the relationship between nature, sexuality, politics, economics, landscape and futurity, by examining a period of history that has hitherto been glossed as heteronormative and socially democratic, and a queer writer who has been neglected by literary critics. Much historical and literary-critical work on post-war British austerity has examined the impact of austerity on working families and particularly women (Zweiniger-Bargielowska 2000; Davies and O’Callaghan 2017), and the rol...
Pasted in each of the 3500-odd volumes of Evelyn Waugh's personal book collection he... more Pasted in each of the 3500-odd volumes of Evelyn Waugh's personal book collection held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRC) at the University of Texas at Austin, is a bookplate. By far the most frequent is what HRC librarian Richard Oram has termed the "armorial" bookplate, comprising the Waugh family crest and motto, Industria Ditat (Industry Enriches). This bookplate, adapting the crest and motto from his father's armorial plate (which itself appears on many of the volumes inherited from Arthur Waugh), was engraved in June 1943 by an engraver named Osmond. There is a bookplate which seems to appear only once, in a history of the Danish firm Peter P. Heering; the "ex libris" plate seems to be one used by the firm for presentation copies of the book. By far the most interesting of the bookplates, which appears with great frequency in books published in the twenties, Oram has termed Waugh's "modernist" bookplate: "Although it is not known when Waugh actually designed and began using this plate, it seems in style and spirit to belong to the early 1920s. Only a handful of earlierbooks from'Waugh's librarybear it." The plate is printed in red and black script on a white ground. Pour marginal panels, with text adapted from the marriage service, read "for better for worse / for richer for poorer / to love and to cherish / in sickness and in health;" these panels surround a central panel which proclaims: "Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh His Book".
Festivity has long been a central concern of literary critics wishing to track the formal, social... more Festivity has long been a central concern of literary critics wishing to track the formal, social, and cultural relation of literature and play. In accounts from Bakhtin onwards, carnival excess fosters renewal of the social realm. Yet the “festive vision” of restoration and rebirth offered by a Bakhtinian critique fails to account for the divergent nature of party literature in the period after World War I. During the interwar period, satirical novels from both sides of the Atlantic represented the decay of modern sociability. When play is transformed into work, a carnival vision becomes untenable; the party is no longer a source of social, emotional, or sacral renewal, but instead the site of what Sianne Ngai has theorized as ugly feelings. In representative novels by Anthony Powell and Carl Van Vechten, disgust and boredom, rather than pleasure and interest, dominate the festive landscape.
The tension between precisions and generalities that catches scholars seeking to define the chara... more The tension between precisions and generalities that catches scholars seeking to define the character of literary modernism fruitfully animates the work of novelist Henry Green. Green takes as his subject matter the ordinary stuff of life—commonplace language, routine experiences, unremarkable relationships—transforming dullness into novelistic event. Two novels demonstrate Green's extraordinary effects achieved through and with the banal, the boring, the vague, and the everyday: Party Going (1939) and Nothing (1951). In Party Going, a group of people stranded at a train station wait with their luggage, order drinks, and lose and find various members of their party. In its attention to the bathetic quotidian, Party Going animates a range of late modernist anxieties about time, leisure, and subjective experience that manifest in the novel's fretful leveling of objects and experiences using the repeated, vague signifier things. Later, in Nothing, a group of socialites—a young couple, their parents, who were former lovers, and the parents’ lovers—have conversations in restaurants and pubs. Nothing dramatizes the inane nature of polite conversation, in which “-thing” is used as a block, as though to empty a conversation of significant information. The multiple subjects and objects embraced by the vague term things suggests that Green's fiction is preoccupied with the “utter contingency of everything (and every thing)” in the modernist period, as Douglas Mao notes. In these novels’ recourse to the any, some, every, or no things of the quotidian, Green explores the potential difference, remarkable sameness, and fuzzy difficulty of late modernist style.
Waugh is a perennial subject for literary scholars; most studies published in the past thirty yea... more Waugh is a perennial subject for literary scholars; most studies published in the past thirty years take a strongly biographical approach, using Waugh’s life and faith as lenses through which to critique the fiction. Evelyn Waugh’s Satire takes a different approach: using frameworks of modernist studies, intertextuality, satire theory, and the contexts of the interwar period, Milthorpe renews debates about the targets and tactics of Waugh’s satire.
"Basil Seal Rides Again" was English novelist Evelyn Waugh's last published work of... more "Basil Seal Rides Again" was English novelist Evelyn Waugh's last published work of fiction. The subtitle of this 1963 short story, "The Rake's Regress," indicates not only return but also re-entry into a place of origin, a regression to the satirical mode Waugh had seemingly laid to rest with the publication of the Sword of Honour trilogy and the beginnings of his autobiographical reminiscences in A Little Learning. In 1962 Waugh set aside his memoir (itself a return to youth) to "recapture," he writes in the dedicatory letter to Mrs. Ian Fleming, the satirical mode, and many of the characters, of his earlier writing ("Basil Seal" [1963] 485). Waugh's return to these characters, in particular Basil Seal and Ambrose Silk, reignites his ambivalent animation of the competing attractions of convention and iconoclasm, attractions which seem implicitly allied to motifs of age and youth. Rather than fading into twilight, Basil Seal "at 60" (Waugh, Letters 593) embarks on one last racket, stripping away the weight of "worldly-wise moralities" ("Basil Seal" 503) to once more rule in what Put Out More Flags described as an "obstreperous minority of one" (54). "Basil Seal Rides Again" is significant not merely because it is Waugh's last work of fiction and his last work of satire, but also because it enacts a satirical rejection of the soft, sad resignation of old age. This short work has received little critical attention. Like 1957's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, the extant criticism of "Basil Seal Rides Again" centers on biographical coincidences with Waugh's own life. Douglas Lane Patey notes that publication of the story of Basil at sixty was delayed, "in an act of self-punishing irony," to coincide with Waugh's own sixtieth birthday, remarking that Basil is "transparently Waugh himself: prematurely aged at sixty, fat, deaf, short of breath" (359). Robert Murray Davis notes Waugh's "autobiographical impulse," seeing Waugh's "own feelings for his daughter Margaret" in the crypto-incestuous relationship between Basil and his daughter (122). Biographical parallels are enticing (especially given Kathleen Hale's frontispiece to the Chapman & Hall limited edition, featuring a Basil Seal visually reminiscent of Waugh at 60) (1.) and can in certain instances be discomfortingly revealing. It is crucial, however, that the story receives a more thorough critical evaluation of its aims, achievements, and complexities as Waugh's final work of satire. The story opens on "two stout, rubicund, richly dressed old buffers" (490) disapprovingly discussing the theft of a set of shirts by a young man, Charles Albright, romantically involved with one of their daughters. The two "old buffers" are Basil Seal and Peter Pastmaster, two of Waugh's earliest creations. Basil--the rogue who stole his mother's emeralds in Black Mischief and exploited Ambrose Silk in Put Out More Flags--and Peter, the pretty young aristocrat of Decline and Fall, are now respected members of an aging generation. Basil and Peter are attending a dinner to celebrate Ambrose's birthday, along with the twinned poets Parsnip and Pimpernell and the aged publisher Mr Bentley, all characters previously seen in Put Out More Flags (and, in Parsnip's case, in the dystopian future of Love Among the Ruins, attempting to access state-funded suicide). The world that Waugh returns to in "Basil Seal Rides Again" has changed utterly, as have its inhabitants. It is the early sixties, and Ambrose, exiled to Ireland for supposed fifth-column fascism in the wartime world of Put Out More Flags, is now the literary status quo, receiving the Order of Merit (Waugh himself refused the CBE2). Basil, following his marriage to Angela Lyne, has "settled into the orderly round of the rich," exchanging the raffish clubs of his youth, Bratt's and Bellamy's, for "that sombre club in Pall Mall that had been the scene of so many painful interviews with his self-appointed guardian, Sir Joseph Mannering" (493). …
Merry Hall, the bestselling 1951 gardening book by the journalist, novelist and bright-young-thin... more Merry Hall, the bestselling 1951 gardening book by the journalist, novelist and bright-young-thing Beverley Nichols (1898–1983), offers opportunities for queering the historical period of post-Second World War austerity, and the cultural practices associated with it. In reading this book we can uncover the anti-austerity utopia sheltered in his Georgian country-house garden. In this chapter I offer a preliminary close reading of this charming and under-read book, and seek to enter contemporary debates about the relationship between nature, sexuality, politics, economics, landscape and futurity, by examining a period of history that has hitherto been glossed as heteronormative and socially democratic, and a queer writer who has been neglected by literary critics. Much historical and literary-critical work on post-war British austerity has examined the impact of austerity on working families and particularly women (Zweiniger-Bargielowska 2000; Davies and O’Callaghan 2017), and the rol...
... of Philosophy of The Australian National University. March 2009 Page 2. I certify that this t... more ... of Philosophy of The Australian National University. March 2009 Page 2. I certify that this thesis is entirely my own work, except where I have given fully documented references to the work of others. _____ Naomi Milthorpe March 18 2009 Page 3. Abstract ...
The editor seeks 500-word proposals for submission to an edited collection devoted to the politic... more The editor seeks 500-word proposals for submission to an edited collection devoted to the politics and poetics of austerity gardening in literary and material cultures in the Anglophone world from the Second World War onwards.
Austerity gardening encompasses a diversity of places, spaces, practices, and actors: from suburban allotments to country house gardens, Victory diggers to urban foragers. Gardens are liminal spaces, private zones, and contested sites, mobilized against foreign invaders whether human or nonhuman. Gardens and gardening are gendered, and in place and practice revelatory of shifting, contingent, and multiple modes of gender and sexual identity. They are idealized, yet ever-incomplete, utopian sites. Gardening is also big business, with global market reports indicating increased demand for DIY products worldwide in the decade since the global financial crisis. Thus gardening and garden literature proffers rich soil for understanding the commodification and uses of culture, whether highbrow or popular, in the mid-to-late 20th century and beyond.
Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) is one of the twentieth century’s great prose stylists and the author of... more Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) is one of the twentieth century’s great prose stylists and the author of a suite of devastating satires on modern English life, from his first unforgettably funny novel Decline and Fall, to his last work of fiction, “Basil Seal Rides Again.” Evelyn Waugh’s Satire: Texts and Contexts renews scholarly debates central to Waugh’s work: the forms of his satire, his attitudes towards modernity and modernism, his place in the literary culture of the interwar period, and his pugnacious (mis)reading of literary and other texts. This study offers new exegetical accounts of the forms and figures of Waugh’s satire, linking original readings of Waugh’s texts to the literary-historical contexts that informed them. Posing fresh readings of familiar works and affording attention to more neglected texts, Evelyn Waugh’s Satire: Texts and Contexts offers readers and scholars a timely opportunity to return to the rich, dark art of this master of prose satire.
This article provides an account of a collaborative teaching and learning project conducted in th... more This article provides an account of a collaborative teaching and learning project conducted in the English programme at the University of Tasmania in 2015. The project, Blended English, involved the development, implementation, and evaluation of learning and teaching activities using online and mobile technologies for undergraduate English units. The authors draw on the project’s findings from survey and focus group data, and staff reflective practice and peer review, to make the case for increasing technology-enhanced teaching and learning in English literary studies. The blended approach described in this article has the capacity to enhance disciplinary learning; increase accessibility for students in remote and regional areas; facilitate deeper scholarly enquiry; and encourage staff to develop innovative, collaborative, and flexible teaching and learning practices. An appendix presents examples of the project’s practical outcomes, as well as outlines of and reflections on three of the activities developed during the project.
This article tells the story of two projects initiated by the University of Tasmania’s English pr... more This article tells the story of two projects initiated by the University of Tasmania’s English programme, which were designed to investigate and improve the pathway from pre-tertiary to tertiary English studies in the state: the First Year English Survey (2012-2014) and the Teaching of English in Tasmania Community of Practice (TETCoP). The authors draw on the findings from the survey to show that students in Tasmania who enrol in tertiary English believe that they are progressing their studies in a discipline with which they are already familiar; it seems reasonable to assume that is also the case nationally. The article, then, presents TETCoP as an example of one approach to developing and maintaining productive links between English educators in the senior secondary and tertiary sectors—as a means to encourage others to build on or learn from the work we have done in Tasmania.
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Austerity gardening encompasses a diversity of places, spaces, practices, and actors: from suburban allotments to country house gardens, Victory diggers to urban foragers. Gardens are liminal spaces, private zones, and contested sites, mobilized against foreign invaders whether human or nonhuman. Gardens and gardening are gendered, and in place and practice revelatory of shifting, contingent, and multiple modes of gender and sexual identity. They are idealized, yet ever-incomplete, utopian sites. Gardening is also big business, with global market reports indicating increased demand for DIY products worldwide in the decade since the global financial crisis. Thus gardening and garden literature proffers rich soil for understanding the commodification and uses of culture, whether highbrow or popular, in the mid-to-late 20th century and beyond.