Dec 29, 2009

Brideshead Revisited | Historical Context

The Pre-War Years and World War II
The book's events take place between 1922 and World War II. Charles Ryder's generation at Oxford was one that found itself too young to fight in the first war, but well into its thirties by the time the Second World War erupted. Throughout the body of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh indicates that something is brewing outside the walls of the stately mansions and colleges where most of the novel's actions take place. Europe, between World War I and World War II, was a place of both great prosperity and dismal poverty, of social...