Evelyn Waugh's Exterior Modernism: Cinema, Satire, Comedy
By (Author) Yuexi Liu
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Bloomsbury Academic
8th January 2026
United Kingdom
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers
Film history, theory or criticism
Hardback
256
Width 156mm, Height 234mm
Drawing on literary manuscripts and the history of cinema, Evelyn Waughs Exterior Modernism examines systematically for the first time Waughs relationship with cinema in the context of modernism, a relationship crucial to the emergence and development of his strand of modernism.
The term exterior modernism refers to the work of a group of younger writers, such as Evelyn Waugh, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Green, Christopher Isherwood, Anthony Powell, Elizabeth Bowen, and Patrick Hamilton, whose departure from high modernism took the form of an outward turn privileging exteriority over the interiority of consciousness through foregrounding talk and drawing on cinema, comedy, and satire. Relating to other exterior modernists, Evelyn Waughs Exterior Modernism focuses on Waugh by way of exemplification, considering his oeuvre, non-fiction as well as fiction. To illuminate Waughs exteriority, Yuexi Liu develops an interdisciplinary framework, informed primarily by distributed cognition.
Yuexi Liu is Assistant Professor in English Literature at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China.