Forms and functions of black humor in the fiction of Evelyn Waugh.
The black humor novel is a distinctive form of contemporary satire which relies heavily upon parodic structure, verbal disjunctions and truncations, and flattened characterizations. While this literary form is usually considered to be an American phenomenon of the fifties and sixties, appearing when...
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| Format: | Thesis Book |
| Language: | English |
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1982.
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| Online Access: | Link to ProQuest Copy Link to OAKTrust copy ProQuest, Abstract |
| Summary: | The black humor novel is a distinctive form of contemporary satire which relies heavily upon parodic structure, verbal disjunctions and truncations, and flattened characterizations. While this literary form is usually considered to be an American phenomenon of the fifties and sixties, appearing when such writers as Joseph Heller, John Barth, Thomas Berger, Robert Coover, and Kurt Vonnegut began devising a fictional response to a modern world they found increasingly alienating, callous, and absurd, there is evidence to suggest that Evelyn Waugh not only anticipated what has been called the "comic-apocalyptic manner," but was, indeed, the first contemporary writer to produce the sustained black comic novel. An examination of the patterns of dialogue, the narrative structure, and the function of parody in his first six novels shows Waugh to be a forerunner of this sub-genre, and reveals the significance of his contribution to the post-modernist novel. Finally, while Waugh's Catholicism may seem to contradict the black comic vision of the world presented in the early novels (and critics often support this view), more accurately, I think, Waugh's Catholicism helped to form an impulse toward black humor which was an escape from a painful vision of the gap between human striving and perfection. |
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| Item Description: | "Major subject: English." Typescript (photocopy). Vita. |
| Physical Description: | vii, 139 leaves ; 29 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (leaves 133-138). |