The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: Vile Bodies

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh offers the first scholarly edition of Waugh's work, bringing together all of his extant writings and graphic art: novels, biographies, travel writing, short fiction, essays, articles, reportage, reviews, poems, juvenilia, parerga, drawings, and designs. No other edition of a British novelist has been undertaken on this scale. Only 15% of Waugh's letters have previously been published. Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh's grandson, is editing a twelve-volume Personal Writings sequence for the series, intercalating over 10,000 letters with the complete, unexpurgated diaries. All volumes will be beautifully produced, and have comprehensive introductions and detailed annotation. Fiction and non-fiction volumes will also contain a full account of each text's manuscript development and textual variants.

The Complete Works will revolutionize Waugh studies, and offer new insights for twentieth-century literary and cultural studies generally. Waughs works are placed in their rich literary and historical context, enabling readers to appreciate for the first time the range and complexity of his thinking and artistic practice, and linking this to the work of his contemporaries in Britain, America and Europe.

This volume is part of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh critical edition, which brings together all Waugh's published and previously unpublished writings for the first time with comprehensive introductions and annotation, and a full account of each text's manuscript development and textual variants. The edition's General Editor is Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh's grandson and editor of the twelve-volume Personal Writings sequence.

This is the first critical edition of Waugh's celebrated novel, a work that is unapologetically modernist in form and tone. The history of Vile Bodies presents an intriguing bibliographical and biographical detective story, not least because Waugh's first wife left him when he was in the middle of writing it. Drawing on previously unpublished correspondence, this edition plots the novel's composition against the cultural backdrop of the 1929 'Flapper's Election', the world of the Bright Young People, and the Wall Street Crash. An introduction and textual analysis explores a range of questions, including: Why were Waugh's corrections to the only extant typescript ignored? What is the evidence to suggest the very point in the autograph manuscript at which Waugh broke off upon learning of his wife's affair? Did he go back over the previous chapter adding darker touches, and, on returning to composition, use the book as a form of public letter to his wife? What readings did the typist
invent through mistranscription?

About the Author:
Evelyn Waugh

Martin Stannard is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Leicester, editor of the Critical Heritage volume on Evelyn Waugh (1984), and author of an acclaimed two-volume Waugh biography (1986, 1992). He is also the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, and co-Editor with Greg Walker of Ashgate's 37-volume series: Studies in European Cultural Transition. Martin Stannard's biography of Muriel Spark was published by Weidenfeld in 2009. He is the Executive Editor of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh.