The Noble Style: Aristocratic Boredom | Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege (2024)

Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege

Adam Parkes

Published:

2023

Online ISBN:

9780191957185

Print ISBN:

9780192866295

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Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege

Adam Parkes

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Adam Parkes

Adam Parkes

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Pages

69–112

  • Published:

    July 2023

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Parkes, Adam, 'The Noble Style: Aristocratic Boredom', Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege (Oxford, 2023; online edn, Oxford Academic, 20 July 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192866295.003.0003, accessed 24 July 2024.

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Abstract

Both stupidity and intelligence have been associated at different times with boredom; like them, boredom has enjoyed considerable prestige among poets and philosophers as a distinctly aristocratic attitude or mood. This chapter shows how the novels of Elizabeth Bowen and Evelyn Waugh anatomize while also cultivating states of upper-class boredom in the time of waning empire. In the Englishman Waugh as in the Anglo-Irish Bowen, skepticism of democracy is joined to versions of late-imperial boredom so intractable that highly specific forms of situational boredom come to resemble a profound existential boredom. Bowen and Waugh picture a belated aristocracy adrift in the waste land of the interwar years, living out a socially and historically specific variation on Schopenhauer’s existential idea of boredom as the index of a “constant postponement of death.”

Keywords: Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh, boredom, British empire, Anglo-Irish, aristocracy, democracy, country house, satire

Subject

Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)

Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege. Adam Parkes, Oxford University Press. © Adam Parkes 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866295.003.0003

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