Dangerous Edges of Graham Greene

Journeys with Saints and Sinners

Dermot Gilvary, Darren J. N. Middleton

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441144386
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Informative, broad-ranging, this title sheds new light on the life and literary art of one of the last century's most celebrated authors.
The first volume to be authorized by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust, "Dangerous Edges of Graham Greene" brings together writers, journalists and scholars to investigate as well as to assess Greene's prolific oeuvre and intense personal interests.
Here the reader may explore everything from Greene's Vienna at the time of the filming of "The Third Man" to his sometimes fraught relationship with Evelyn Waugh, from Greene's unconventional fictional treatment of women to his "believing skepticism".
While Greene often informed friends that "a ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system", critics of his literary art have found it extraordinarily difficult to define the content of this "ruling passion".
Perhaps this is because Greene's own character seems so paradoxical, ironic even.
Moreover, in believing that sin contains within itself the seeds of saintliness, he consistently loiters on what Robert Browning calls "the dangerous edge of things". In exploring this "dangerous edge", this book covers the full breadth of Greene's life and literary career.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Stamboul Train: The Timetable for 1932
• Chapter 2 ‘Ghost on the Rooftops’: How Joseph Conrad Haunted Graham Greene
• Chapter 3 The Making of the Outsider in the Short Stories of the 1930s
• Chapter 4 The Riddles of Graham Greene: Brighton Rock Revisited
• Chapter 5 Innocence and Experience: The Condition of Childhood in Graham Greene’s Fiction
• Chapter 6 Janiform Greene: The Paradoxes and Pleasures of The Power and the Glory
• Chapter 7 Sigmund Freud and Graham Greene in Vienna
• Chapter 8 Going Especially Careful: Language Reference in Graham Greene
• Chapter 9 Prophecy and Comedy in Havana: Graham Greene’s Spy Fiction and Cold War Reality
• Chapter 10 Graham Greene and A Burnt-Out Case: A Psychoanalytic Reading
• Chapter 11 A Touch of Evolutionary Religion
• Chapter 12 Inside and Outside: Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh
• Chapter 13 The Long Wait for Aunt Augusta: Reflections on Graham Greene’s Fictional Women
• Chapter 14 Graham Greene and Alfred Hitchcock
• Chapter 15 The Plays of Graham Greene
• Chapter 16 Graham Greene and Charlie Chaplin
• Chapter 17 The Later Greene: From Modernist to Moralist
• Afterword Reading Graham Greene in the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Contributors
• Index