A Good Laugh Is Hard to Find: From Destructive Satire to Sacramental Humor in Evelyn Waugh's Helena

Despite Evelyn Waugh's conviction that Helena (1950) was his greatest work, the novel receives less critical attention than his well-known interwar satires and his postwar hit, Brideshead Revisited (1945). This article argues that the novel accomplishes Waugh's self-conscious postwar effor...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Tomko, Helena M. 1974- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Johns Hopkins University Press [2018]
In: Christianity & literature
Year: 2018, Volume: 67, Issue: 2, Pages: 312-331
IxTheo Classification:CD Christianity and Culture
NBP Sacramentology; sacraments
TK Recent history
Further subjects:B BRIDESHEAD Revisited (Book : Waugh)
B Helena (1950)
B Sacramentals
B sacramental humor
B Satire
B Evelyn Waugh
B WAUGH, Evelyn, 1903-1966
B HELENA (Book)
B Sacraments
Online Access: Presumably Free Access
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Summary:Despite Evelyn Waugh's conviction that Helena (1950) was his greatest work, the novel receives less critical attention than his well-known interwar satires and his postwar hit, Brideshead Revisited (1945). This article argues that the novel accomplishes Waugh's self-conscious postwar effort to rehouse his satiric impulses in a mode that resists both the “dark” laughter of modernism and the sentimentality risked in mid-century Catholic fiction. With metafictive attention to genre and style, Helena exemplifies what this article terms “sacramental humor.” Waugh's fictionalized St. Helena embodies the contrast between satire that seeks to correct or destroy and humor that seeks to heal.
ISSN:2056-5666
Contains:Enthalten in: Christianity & literature
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1177/0148333117746171