![]() Brideshead is told through the witness of Charles Ryder, a largely secular and jaded figure drawn into the world of the aristocratic Catholic Flyte family. In this way Waugh begins to trace some of the transitional contours between the Christendom and Apostolic ages. This is largely because the novel deals with the rise of the modern era, the decline of institutional Christianity, and the admixture of sin and grace in each character we meet. Though Brideshead follows the immensely wealthy and eccentric aristocratic family, the average reader-say, an American commoner-still feels much sympathy with the novel’s characters. ![]() Waugh’s prose is witty, his characters vivid, and their situations often poignantly tragic and somehow hilarious. ![]() We could put it in the Mount Rushmore of Catholic literature if the novel weren’t also so distinctly English, which is part of the story-the Church in England past and present. ![]() Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder is perhaps one of the fictional literary works which most integrates the Catholic imagination, to live and think imaginatively with the Church. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |