Brideshead Revisited Critics

Christensen on Charles

'Charles is more concerned with creating an effect than felling what actually happened'

Stopp on Charles

'not properly a moral agent'

Christensen on Sebastian

he argues Sebastian's love of childhood fundamentally stems from a fear of living as an adult gay man'

Wykes on Julia

'Julia Flyte...is the book's great failure...dead as a mutton'

Wykes on Julia and Charles

'Julia is there to provide a morally and socially acceptable consummation of the love between Sebastian and Ryder'

LaFrance on Rex

'Waugh's self-seeking man of affairs, a social and moral buccaneer'

Baldwin on Rex

'the wisdom of Rex Mottram is that of buying cheap and selling dear'

LaFrance on Anthony Blanche

'given the responsibility of passing aesthetic judgement'

Delasanta on Cordelia

'Cordelia, like her namesake in King Lear, is all heart'

Wykes on Lady Marchmain

'the succubus quality of her love'

Heath on Mr. Ryder

'Charles Ryder escapes the tyranny of his earthly father by at last responding to the reins of a heavenly one'

DeCoste on Mr. Ryder

'in rejecting his children, Charles is re-enacting his own father's wounding indifference'

Delasanta on Bridey

'Bridey is all head'

Slater on Celia

'sterile sex in a marriage without love'

Christensen on Religion

'a chief tension in the novel is the struggle between two Catholicisms; a stifling version and a more generous and catholic spirit'

Su on Religion

'catholicism is inseperable from Waugh's longing to restore a notion of Englishness'

De Vitis on Religion

'it is the permanence that all his bright you g things sought for'

LaFrance on Brideshead

'its decline functions as a sort of graph of the aristocracy's increasing irresponsibility and loss of power'

Delasanta on Brideshead

'the Brideshead Estate in the novel is representative of the Roman Catholic Church in the modern world'

Christensen on Brideshead

'Brideshead transcends deterioration'

Slater on Charles and Julia

'the only thing redeeming Charles Ryder is his genuine love for Julia'

Christensen on Charles and Sebastian

'the fragile nature of love between a gay man and a straight man'

Bratten on Art

'art for Charles is a means to an end'

Falcetta on Art

'a subtle pictorial encoding of each station on Charles's slow Damascus road to faith'

Rothstein on Class

'Waugh resists a prevailing discourse of bourgeoise individualism and materialism'

O'Donnell on Class

'his veneration for the upper classes becomes more marked than his contempt for his social inferiors'

Wilson on Class

'Waugh's snobbery...has here emerged shameless and rampant'

Baldwin on Food & Drink

'reinforces the novel's theme of decay and decline', 'food is thus here...a gift with an "edge"'

Laura Freeman on Food & Drink

she argues the context of rationing is vital in understanding the luxurious excess of food and drink imagery

Stopp on Women

'essentially a male world'

Schaffer on Women

'Waugh's female characters fall either under the heading of the dangerous temptress or the childlike (and therefore insignificant) woman'

Baldwin on Style

'his overriding tone of pessimism'

Joyce on Style

'tragic mode'

Eagleton on Style

'piece of late realism'

LaFrance on Style

'an attempt to force a serious frame of reference upon an unconscious use of the comic tradition'

Gaston on Structure

'the revised structure...is very reminiscent of a neo-classical facade'

Littlewood on Style

'Waugh's ultimate concern in Brideshead Revisited is not to indulge nostalgia but to transcend it'

Bratten on Style

'necessary purgation of pleasure'

Rothstein on Style

'the rich pictorial language of Brideshead attests to this desire to materialise memory'