Graham Greene and the Politics of Popular Fiction and Film (Hardback)

When a writer produces a novel that is both denounced as Communist propaganda and extolled as the ideal travelling companion for hearty venture capitalists looking to conquer the untapped markets of Southeast Asia, one would expect to see a troupe of post-modernist scholars scrambling to be the first to point out the textual ironies at play. Strangely, however, this has not been the case for Graham Greene, author of The Quiet American and several dozen of the twentieth-century's most critically acclaimed bestsellers. Graham Greene and the Politics of Popular Fiction and Film examines why contemporary scholars have largely ignored the popular and wildly controversial writer. It explores how the evolution of literature as a discipline helped entrench intellectual biases against popular fiction, how the post-war economy and the collapse of the Hollywood studio system conspired to transform The Third Man from a thriller into the work of an auteur, and why movie critics felt that The End of the Affair was sexually obscene while priests celebrated God's belated cameo on cinema screens.