Title: Graham Greene's thrillers and the 1930s
First published: 1996
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.
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation, English Political fiction, History, History and criticism, Nineteen thirties, Political and social views, Political fiction, English, Politics and literature, Social life and customs, Critique et interprétation, Kriminalroman, English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, LITERARY CRITICISM, Zeithintergrund, Manners and customs, European, Geschichte 1930-1945, Histoire et critique, Roman policier anglais, Pensée politique et sociale, Politique-fiction anglaise, Thriller, Greene, graham, 1904-1991, Political fiction, history and criticism
Places: Great Britain
People: Graham Greene (1904-)
Time periods: 1918-1945, 20th century
LC classification: PR6013.R44 Z6322 1996