‘The Twilight of Language’: The Young Evelyn Waugh on ‘Catherine’ Mansfield

This chapter offers the first account of Katherine Mansfield's literary connections to Evelyn Waugh. It exposes the satiric potential of literary influence through a consideration of Waugh's schoolboy paper ‘The Twilight of Language’ (1921). Milthorpe describes satire as ‘a mode of writing by necessity alive to outside in influence’ and notes the significant intertextual parallels of narrative, theme and technique between Mansfield's ‘Bliss’ (1918) and Waugh's A Handful of Dust (1934), making the case that Waugh’s response to modernism should be interpreted not as rejection, but instead as ‘a destructive misreading that generates a parodic likeness’.