Evelyn Waugh project will be ‘one of the great monuments of twenty-first century literary scholarship’

Praise from Times Literary Supplement for incomparable project to publish, for the first time, novelist's entire output

A landmark literary project to publish the definitive collection of the entire output of one of the most revered novelists of the twentieth century has been praised by the Times Literary Supplement.

The leading international literature and culture publication has reviewed the first five published volumes of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, led by Professor Martin Stannard from our School of Arts.

This hugely ambitious research project with Oxford University Press aims to publish the complete works of Evelyn Waugh in a massive edition of 43 volumes. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, this will be the most exhaustive collation of work by a British novelist ever undertaken.

In the review, published in their 24 & 31 August issue, Paula Byrne writes: “This monumental project, undertaken by the University of Leicester in conjunction with Oxford University Press, has the author's grandson Alexander Waugh at the helm and his fullest biographer, Martin Stannard, as co-executive editor. If these initial [five volumes] are an indicator of things to come, then the edition will justify its grandiose claim to 'revolutionise Waugh studies'. [...] It will indeed become one of the great monuments of twenty-first century literary scholarship.”

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh brings together, for the first time, all of Waugh's extant writings and graphic art, both previously published and unpublished. No other collection of a British novelist’s work has been undertaken on a comparable scale. Overseen by Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh's grandson and the edition's General Editor, it will include novels, biographies, essays, letters, reportage, travel writings, reviews, diaries, poems, drawings, and designs, presented with comprehensive introductions and annotation.