Brideshead Revisited: Genre 1 key example

The novel includes references to many important figures in British literary Modernism, including poet T. S. Eliot and playwright George Bernard Shaw. Such allusions not only inform the narrator's character—as a college-educated man of his time—but situate Brideshead Revisited in its proper literary context. 

Note the following allusion to George Bernard Shaw from Part 1, Chapter 2:

None but church-goers seemed abroad that morning [...]. Four proud infidels alone proclaimed their dissent; four Indians from the gates of Balliol, in freshly-laundered white flannels and neatly pressed blazers, with snow-white turbans on their heads, and in their plump, brown hands bright cushions, a picnic basket and the Plays Unpleasant of Bernard Shaw, making for the river.

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Plays Unpleasant is a collection of three plays, each geared towards addressing some prescient moral conflict of the era. Mrs. Warren's Profession, for instance, deals with a main character whose mother owns and operates several prominent brothels across Europe. Shaw wrote each play in the collection with the audience's discomfort in mind, intending to challenge morals rather than entertain the masses.

In the above passage, Waugh juxtaposes the "infidels" with English churchgoers, comparing their respective religious texts: the Bible, and Plays Unpleasant. While certain characters in Brideshead Revisited might presume the "infidels" to be immoral because they don't attend church, Waugh suggests an alternative framing. The "infidels" are just as, if not more devoted to questions of morality, choosing to study Shaw's plays on a Sunday morning to meditate on the era's pressing ethical quandaries.

Plays Unpleasant and Brideshead Revisited both carry implicit critiques of organized religion, pointing out the ways in which practitioners can become hypocritical. The two works are intimately interconnected through genre, through thematic content, and—in the above passage—through allusion.