Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies in Franco’s Spain and Communist Romania

Abstract

Despite Evelyn Waugh’s success as a novelist, his work was criticised in England for his political, religious and moral views. The purpose of this paper is to study the reception of Waugh’s novels in two countries governed by totalitarian regimes —Franco’s Spain and communist Romania— where culture was controlled by severe censorship systems. The methodology employed is based on Hans Robert Jauss’s aesthetics of reception. The research conducted at the General Archive of the Administration in Alcalá de Henares and the National Archives of Romania in Bucharest shows that the reception of Waugh’s novels in both countries was conditioned by the censorial apparatus.