Evelyn Waugh and The Waste Land

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine the hypertextual relationship between Evelyn Waugh’s fiction and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Drawing on Gérard Genette’s theory of hypertextuality, it argues that Waugh’s novels – Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), A Handful of Dust (1934), and Brideshead Revisited (1945) – not only allude to Eliot’s poem but also mirror its fragmented structure and thematic concerns: spiritual desolation, cultural collapse, and the existential yearning for meaning. Each novel is read alongside a specific section of The Waste Land, allowing for an interpretation of Waugh’s oeuvre as a sustained, intertextual response to modernist anxiety. The paper suggests that Waugh constructs his own narrative wasteland – a fictional world woven from repetition, allusion, and recurring figures – where satire coexists with deeper reflections on faith, redemption, and human frailty. Like Eliot, Waugh leaves room for fleeting glimpses of hope. This ongoing dialogue with The Waste Land offers fresh insight into Waugh’s place within the modernist tradition.