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.

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.

Gathers Greene's film writings, and offers a brief introduction to the role of motion pictures in his life and career

One of the most popular, respected and controversial writers of the twentieth century, Greene's work has still attracted relatively little scholarly comment. Thomson charts the intricate dance between his novels and screenplays, his many audiences, and an intellectual establishment reluctant to identify the work of a popular writer as '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.

Levay analyzes representations of the criminal in British and American modernism from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s.