A Study in Greene Graham Greene and the Art of the Novel

Bernard Bergonzi has been reading Graham Greene for many years; he still possesses the original edition of The End of the Affair that he bought when it was published in 1951. After so much recent attention to Greene's life he believes it is time to return to his writings; in this critical
study Bergonzi makes a close examination of the language and structure of Greene's novels, and traces the obsessive motifs that recur throughout his long career. Most earlier criticism was written while Greene was still alive and working, and was to some extent provisional, as the final shape of his
work was not yet apparent. In this book Bergonzi is able to take a view of Greene's whole career as a novelist, which extended from 1929 to 1988. He believes that Greene's earlier work was his best, combining melodrama, realism, and poetry, with Brighton Rock, published in 1938, a moral fable that
draws on crime fiction and Jacobean tragedy, as the masterpiece. The novels that Greene published after the 1950s were very professional examples of skilful story-telling but represented a decline from this high level of achievement. Bergonzi challenges assumptions about the nature of Greene's debt
to cinema, and attempts to clarify the complexities and contradictions of his religious ideas. Although this book engages with questions that arise in academic discussions of Greene, it is written with general readers in mind.

1 - Obsessions and Jokes
2 - Into the Thirties
3 - Entertainments
4 - Brighton
5 - Mexico
6 - A Catholic Novelist?
7 - The Greene Man
8 - Manic Interludes
9 - Last Words

Bernard Bergonzi read English as a mature student at Wadham College, Oxford, having previously worked in clerical jobs. He has been assistant lecturer, then lecturer, at the University of Manchester, and senior lecturer and then Professor of English at the University of Warwick. He has been Emeritus Professor of English there since 1992, and has held visiting professorships at Brandeis, Stanford, and Louisville. Since 1961 he has published many books of criticism and biography, and edited several more. His most recent titles include Exploding English: Criticism, Theory, Culture (OUP, 1990), Wartime and Aftermath: English Literature and its Background 1939-1960 (OUP, 1993), War Poets and Other Subjects (Ashgate, 2000), and A Victorian Wanderer: The Life of Thomas Arnold the Younger (OUP, 2003), of which A. N. Wilson wrote in the Spectator, 'Professor Bergonzi has painted a perfect Victorian miniature'.