Carens, James F. The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966. [The chapters are organized by topic, and within them each novel is treated relatively briefly. Decline and Fall is most usefully discussed in Chapters 6 ("Waugh and the Satiric Spectrum") and 7 ("Satire and Negation"). The first of these is particularly concerned with satiric technique, the second with the vexing problem of writing satire that seems valueless.]
Crabbe, Katharyn W. Evelyn Waugh. New York: Continuum, 1988. [An introductory book, with an opening biographical chapter, a closing chapter on style, and chapters surveying the novels (in groups of three). Sees Decline and Fall as "a very funny story with a very discomforting implication," because Paul is ignorant and innocent but an unreal character without feelings or motives.]Doyle, Paul. A Reader's Companion to the Novels and Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh. Norman, OK: Pilgrim, 1988. [Includes a "glossary" of terms and material references, organized by novel, and a "dictionary" giving biographical details of the characters, but does not include critical material.]
Frick, Robert. "Style and Structure in the Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh." Papers on Language and Literature 28.4 (Fall 1992): 417-41. [Although claiming that his purpose is "to outline the dominant features of Waugh's minimalist rhetoric, and to relate those features to certain ideas concerning the nature of satire and comic irony," Frick is primarily concerned with the spare, detached, and objective qualities of Waugh's narrative voice and rhetoric.]
Garnett, Robert R. From Grimes to Brideshead: The Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1990. [Rejects several serious readings of the novels, including the claim that they are satiric (rather than absurdist). Prefers Waugh's earlier novels to his later ones because of their vitality. "Decline and Fall had no broad artistic ambitions or thematic motives to divert him from comic play."]
Greenblatt, Stephen Jay. Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965. [Greenblatt's essay on Waugh's first four novels, including his excellent discussion of Decline and Fall, appears in a book which was, in fact, his undergraduate honors thesis at Yale. (He has gone on to become a distinguished critic, especially of Shakespeare). "In Waugh's satiric vision, seemingly trivial events-the breaking up of a manor house, the redecoration of an old room with chromium plating, a drunken brawl in an Oxford courtyard-are symbols of a massive, irreversible, and terrifying victory of barbarism and the powers of darkness over civilization and light."]
Heath, Jeffrey. The Picturesque Prison: Evelyn Waugh and his Writing. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1982. [Sees Waugh as a profound satirist who sought to escape one prison only to find himself in another. Decline and Fall is "a concise universal history of drunkenness" that expresses both Waugh's fascination with anarchic disorder and his condemnation of false authority. Waugh's perfect style makes the novel seem more outrageous.]
Littlewood, Ian. The Writings of Evelyn Waugh. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983. [Sees Waugh's novels as an effort to escape from despair and to oppose the elements of experience that lead to despair. "I have in mind more curious processes: the omissions and distortions, deflections, exaggerations and denials by which a novelist can try to cheat reality of the power to oppress him." Chapters on detachment of tone, humor, romanticism, nostalgia, and religion.]
Loe, Thomas. "Design and Satire in Decline and Fall." Studies in Contemporary Satire 17 (1990): 31-41. [Finds the circular patterns of structure in Decline and Fall ambiguous: "they seem both to confirm the sterile repetitiveness of modern society and at the same time to suggest alternatives through glimpses of primordial pattern of rebirth or resurrection."]
Lynch, Richard P. "Evelyn Waugh's Early Novels: The Limits of Fiction." Papers on Language and Literature (Fall 1994): 373-86. [Argues that Waugh shares with postmoderns and with the nouveau roman "objections to the power of the novel to imitate reality and to discover general truths and permanent character types."]
McCartney, George. Confused Roaring: Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. [McCartney's first chapter reads Decline and Fall in terms of the historical and philosophical positions of Oswald Spengler and Friedrich Nietzsche. For Waugh the collapse of solid values recorded in the novel amounts to "an abdication of reason's authority, which was bound to result in the mindless self-assertion he thought characteristic of modern life."]
Morriss, Margaret and D. J. Dooley. Evelyn Waugh: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. [An annotated bibliography of material on Waugh from 1919 through 1983. Works are listed chronologically (by year) under "Books" and "Shorter Writings." The summaries provide a mine of information, randomly organized.]
Patey, Douglas Lane. The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1998. [A particularly intelligent life-and-works book that sees Decline and Fall as a satire that embodies a Catholic point-of-view (although Waugh had not yet converted to Catholicism) and as a bildungsroman in which Paul gains a spiritual insight denied to the other characters: "Decline and Fall surveys through their debased representatives the major cultural institutions whose task is to teach, moralize, and discipline us: guardians, teachers, priests, judges, prison governors, leaders of the state and of 'society."]
Stannard, Martin. Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987. [Stannard's archival research and interviews with surviving friends of Waugh allow him to correct previous biographies. Although his biography does not offer a full critical reading of Decline and Fall, it provides interesting information regarding Waugh's manuscript version and revisions, sees the novel as particularly influenced by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and suggests that it "can be read, not simply as a nihilistic farce but as an exuberant, drunken challenge to Mammon."]
Stopp, Frederick J. Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of an Artist. London: Chapman and Hall, 1958. [A pioneering study of Waugh; its biographical material has largely been superceded, but its criticism is still useful. Decline and Fall reveals Waugh as a master of "the higher lunacy." "The extremes of rational doubt and of rational dogmatism have indeed be eliminated by the simple and efficacious process of being fused and consumed in the white-hot flame of their joint lunacy."]
Waugh, Evelyn. A Little Learning: The First Volume of an Autobiography. London: Methuen, 1964. [The only completed volume of Waugh's autobiography narrates his life through the experiences that contribute to his picture of Llanabba Castle, concluding with comic descriptions of the character who became Captain Grimes and of Waugh's attempted suicide.]
Wykes, David. Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's, 1999. [A rather gossipy biography of Waugh, drawing on his diaries and letters and on previous biographies. Waugh's works are treated rather briefly but usefully. Sees Decline and Fall as a novel of development (Bildungsroman) in which the author does not share the reader's sympathy for the victimized central character. Argues that Waugh is not a satirist and Decline and Fall is not a satire because Waugh rejects a world where truth and justice are possible.]