Drawing on literary manuscripts and the history of cinema, Evelyn Waugh's Exterior Modernism examines systematically for the first time Waugh's relationship with cinema in the context of modernism, a relationship crucial to the emergence and development of his strand of modernism.
The term 'exterior modernism' refers to the work of a group of younger writers, such as Evelyn Waugh, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Green, Christopher Isherwood, Anthony Powell, Elizabeth Bowen, and Patrick Hamilton, whose departure from high modernism took the form of an 'outward turn' privileging exteriority over the interiority of consciousness through foregrounding talk and drawing on cinema, comedy, and satire. Relating to other exterior modernists, Evelyn Waugh's Exterior Modernism focuses on Waugh by way of exemplification, considering his oeuvre, non-fiction as well as fiction. To illuminate Waugh's exteriority, Yuexi Liu develops an interdisciplinary framework, informed primarily by distributed cognition.