Graham Greene's thrillers and the 1930s
By: Brian Diemert.
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Montreal; Buffalo
Language: eng
Number of pages: 237
Subjects: Greene, Graham, 1904- -- Criticism and interpretation.; Greene, Graham, 1904- -- Political and social views.; Politics and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century.; Political fiction, English -- History and criticism.; Nineteen thirties.; Great Britain -- Social life and customs -- 1918-1945.
Description: In Graham Greene's Thrillers and the 1930s Brian Diemert examines the first and most prolific phase of Graham Greene's career, demonstrating the close relationship between Greene's fiction and the political, economic, social, and literary contexts of the period.

Situating Greene alongside other young writers who responded to the worsening political climate of the 1930s by promoting social and political reform, Diemert argues that Greene believed literature could not be divorced from its social and political milieu and saw popular forms of writing as the best way to inform a wide audience.

Diemert traces Greene's adaptation of nineteenth-century romance thrillers and classical detective stories into modern political thrillers as a means of presenting serious concerns in an engaging fashion. He argues that Greene's popular thrillers were in part a reaction to the high modernism of writers such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, whose esoteric experiments with language were disengaged from immediate social concerns and inaccessible to a large segment of the reading public.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [211]-230) and index.