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...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Johns Hopkins University Press
[2018]
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| 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 Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| 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. |
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| ISSN: | 2056-5666 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Christianity & literature
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1177/0148333117746171 |