Art imitating life: The writings of Evelyn Waugh. (Volumes I and II).

The dissertation is a systematic approach to five institutions that appear prominently in the fiction of Evelyn Waugh. These institutions include Oxford, marriage, the aristocracy, the military, and the Roman Catholic Church, all more or less important to Waugh at one time or another. His sense of each institution's value changed, however, and such changes are clearly reflected in his fictional representation of these institutions. I have traced the changing representation of each institution from novel to novel and have tried to suggest biographical reasons for the changes. The dissertation aspires to a better underst and ing of Waugh's life based upon an underst and ing of how he represented life in fiction. Gradually I became aware of Waugh's tendency to see himself as a persecuted being, a tendency that permeates all his writing. Waugh himself was aware of what he called his "persecution mania," but no critic has noticed its appearance in almost every aspect of his life and work. Persecution mania seems to have started in the nursery, where Evelyn felt less favored than his brother Alec, and it exerted some influence throughout his life, apparently contributing to the collapse of his first marriage, to his choice of subjects for biographies, to his hallucinations in 1954, and , most importantly, to his fictional characters and situations. Over and over again, Waugh's heroes are persecuted, betrayed by women they love, imprisoned by sadists, and swindled by con-men. Previous critical work has taken such characters as essential elements of satire, which they are, but this fact is less important than the idea that Waugh found the persecuted hero an apt representation of his own experience. Persecution mania is also, of course, evident in his attitudes toward institutions, and I have tried to demonstrate its persistence in the five areas of Waugh's life I have addressed.Ph.D.British and Irish literatureUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162145/1/8907169.pd