The Vocation of Evelyn Waugh

Arguing against the critical commonplace that Evelyn Waugh’s post-war fiction represents a decline in his writerly powers, D. Marcel DeCoste analyzes Waugh's major works from Brideshead Revisited to Unconditional Surrender. As DeCoste shows, Waugh offers in these later works an under-remarked meditation on the dangers of aestheticism in the context of modern secularism, forging in the second half of his career a literary achievement that both narrates and enacts a more Catholic literary vocation.