Waugh was not pleased, in the late twenties, to see a resurgence of interest in the aesthetes. Waugh had little admiration for any of the decadents, with the exception of Ronald Firbank, whose stylistic and structural innovations he praised highly in his youth1 and, as he later admitted, used in his own early novels, particularly Vile Bodies 2 however, Waugh borrowed only those satiric techniques which set Firbank apart from his contemporaries, qualifying the decadence and sentimental ism of his fin de siècle inheritance. If one were to consider the authors who might have provided literary inspiration for Evelyn Waugh, perhaps the least likely candidate would be Oscar Wilde.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |