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What is a “Catholic” novel? This book analyzes the fiction of Graham Greene in a radically new manner, considering in depth its form and content, which rest on the oppositions between secularism and religion. Sampson challenges these distinctions, arguing that Greene has a dramatic contribution to add to their methodological premises. Chapters on Greene’s four “Catholic” novels and two of his “post-Catholic” novels are complemented by fresh insight into the critical importance of his nonfiction. The study paints an image of an inviting yet beguilingly complex literary figure.
Price: $39.00
Pages: 304
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Imprint: Fordham University Press
Series: Studies in the Catholic Imagination: The Flannery O'Connor Trust Series
Publication Date:
03 August 2021
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780823294671
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
Martyn Sampson expands our understanding of both Graham Greene’s Catholic imagination and the status of theological aesthetics by focusing on the formal dimensions of Greene’s literary production over the easily abstracted theological content of his work. Sampson uses the term ‘impulses’ to interrogate the imaginative pressures of faith, belief, and doubt that drove Greene’s work throughout his long literary career. He argues, in the end, that Greene’s conception of what a Catholic novel might be is more about a genre that brings the secular and the religious closer than apart, an embrace of possibility and risk at the heart of the human condition. What is remarkable in this study is Sampson’s deep reading of the discourses of critical theory placed in conversation with the vast range of Greene’s scholarship over the past decade. Between Form and Faith is an impressive achievement---Mark Bosco, S.J., Georgetown University, author of Graham Greene's Catholic Imagination
Martyn Sampson earned his Ph.D. from the University of the West of England, Bristol, where he taught English. He served as Director of the 2018 and 2019 Graham Greene International Festivals.
Introduction: The Uninstructed Catholic | 1
1 The Ache of Modernism: Theological Aesthetics in Greene’s Nonfiction | 15
2 Catholic Novels: Religious Anxieties in Brighton Rock and The Heart of the Matter | 38
3 Creator of Heaven and Earth:
Catholicism and the “Catholic” in The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair | 80
4 Entertaining the Second Vatican Council:
Creative Theologies in The Honorary Consul and Monsignor Quixote | 119
5 Theory and Theology: Graham Greene’s Remapping of Common Ground | 161
Conclusion: Where Now? | 195
Acknowledgments | 201
Notes | 205
Bibliography | 233
Index | 261