Ecumenical Craft: Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and their Victorian Masters

Abstract

This project considers the literary debts of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene to a handful of Victorian artists, mostly protestant, with special emphasis on Charles Dickens. Chapter 1 introduces the novelists and addresses objections to my thesis. Chapter 2 is a literature review on the English Catholic literary renaissance at the turn of the twentieth century. Chapters 3 and 4 develop a theory and definition of the Catholic novel, focusing on the problem of literary and philosophical realism, Flannery O'Connor's conception of "anagogical vision," and Jacques Maritain's writings on art and the novel as a literary form. Chapters 5 and 6 in turn analyze several books, both fiction and non-fiction, by Waugh and Greene.