DOCSLIB.ORG

Bangor University DOCTOR of PHILOSOPHY Make Yourself At

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Bangor University DOCTOR of PHILOSOPHY Make Yourself At Bangor University DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Make yourself at home : home and the pursuit of authenticity in the writing of Graham Greene Nock, Emma Award date: 2006 Awarding institution: Bangor University Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 09. Oct. 2021 "Make yourself at home": Home and the Pursuit ofAuthenticity in the Writing ofGraham Greene EmmaL. Nock In fulfilment ofthe requirements ofthe Degree ofDoctor ofPhilosophy in the University ofWales Department ofEnglish, University ofWales, Bangor 2006 Summary This thesis examines Graham Greene's treatment of ideas of home through the full course ofhis writing career and finds that, while the sense ofhome proves elusive for Greene's characters, they nonetheless consistently search for such a place. As Greene's career progresses it becomes ever more apparent that "home" is not necessarily the home of traditional expectation, but may be found in a variety of unforeseen places and experiences. Chapter One deals with the 1930s-the upheaval of the inter-war period and nostalgia for the lost security of the Victorian world-as experienced by Greene's youthful characters, all of whom are, in varying degrees, either actually or metaphorically homeless. Chapter Two sees the characters moving on into adulthood, becoming settled (or trapped) into conventional family homes. The background ofthe Second World War brings a sense of danger into ordinary life: many characters revel in this intrusion of the unheimlich into the everyday. In Chapter Three, which considers Greene's work in the 1950s and 1960s, Greene's characters struggle with the new uncertainty ofthe post-war, atomic age. Facing the fear of total destruction, many retreat into detachment, leaving behind old notions of home. Their aim is to go ever further, never back. Chapter Four covers Greene's last years and his fiction in the 1970s and 1980s, as he sought and found his own final home. His characters discover a more abstract sense of home, as Greene plays with ideas of fiction and reality and finds a blurred line between the two. Ultimately, my thesis finds that Greene and his characters are made more, not less, concerned with ideas ofhome by their homeless status, and that eventually, a sort of home is available to almost all who will look beyond the obvious, conventional means to it. These characters will attain a sense of personal authenticity without which, in Greene's work, no real home may be found. Contents Introduction. "All which is expressed by 'horne."? 7 Chapter One. "The sad houseless world": Unhomed in 25 the 1930s. Chapter Two. Lost in No Man's Land: In Search ofa 109 Spiritual Home. Chapter Three. "It is not good to be too free"-Greene 171 in the 1950s and 1960s. Chapter Four. "To Play at Home with Paper [...J": 237 Greene's Later Years. Conclusion. 311 Bibliography ofWorks Consulted. 319 4 Acknowledgements I wish to thank my parents for their unstinting support over the long years ofstudy. I am grateful also to my research supervisor, Dr Tony Brown, for his advice, encouragement and unwavering enthusiasm. 6 List 0 f Works by Greene Cited in Textual References & Abbreviations Used- BA Babbling April (1925) BR Brighton Rock (1938) BOC A Burnt-Out Case (1961) CAE The Captain and the Enemy (1988) CE Collected Essays (1969) CP Collected Plays (1985) CS Collected Stories (1972) C The Comedians (1966) CA The Confidential Agent (1939) DF Doctor Fischer ofGeneva or the Bomb Party (1980) EA The End ofthe Affair (1951) EMM England Made Me (1935) GFS A Gun for Sale (1936) GKG Getting to Know the General (1984) HOM The Heart ofthe Matter (1948) HC The Honorary Consul (1973) HF The Human Factor (1978) SC In Search ofa Character (1971 ) B It's a Battlefield (1934) JWM Journey Without Maps (1936) LW The Last Word and Other Stories (1990) LR The Lawless Roads (1939) LTA Loser Takes All (1955) MW The Man Within (1929) MF The Ministry ofFear (1943) MQ Monsignor Quixote (1982) MD Mornings in the Dark: The Graham Greene Film Reader (1993) NA The Name ofAction (1930) NS Nineteen Stories (1947) MH Our Man in Havana (1958) PG The Power and the Glory (1940) QA The Quiet American (1955) R Reflections (1991) RN Rumour at Nightfall (1931) SL A Sort ofLife (1971) ST Stamboul Train (1932) TA Travels with My Aunt (1969) TM The Tenth Man (1985) WE Ways ofEscape (1992) WMO A World ofMy Own (1992) YE Yours Etc. (1989) 7 Introduction: "AU which is expressed by 'home""! What is home? What is f! home? In its simplest form, home is the place in which you live, have lived, and will live: your permanent residence. It may be the place in which you were born or grew up, from which your family come, the place where you now live, even the place in which you hope one day to live. But home denotes much more than an actual geographical location. It is not simply a house, village. town or even country; it is a less tangible entity and a much more complex concept. When we speak of"home," many ofus are referring not so much to a place as to a feeling inspired by that place. Home may be a state ofmind. Home is undoubtedly related to personal identity: the places we call "home" are the places which define us, the places to which we feel we belong, and which we feel belong to us, whether or not they are also the places ofour longstanding residence. Such places inspire us with hope and confidence, and they allow us to grow, to become more like the people we wish we were. "People are made by places," Greene himselfnotes (LR 16), and this is inescapable. It is impossible to live for any significant period oftime in a place without building a relationship with it. being shaped by it; whether you love or hate the place is immaterial in this respect. We are not detached from our domestic surroundings, even in the modern age when travel is cheaper and easier than ever. Home remains home. The childhood home is the first place ofall, the most familiar, the most intimately known. It cannot be forgotten. The homes ofadulthood will generally be attempts either to recreate or to --- _.- .... _------- I Graham Greene, The Name ofAction (London: Heinemann, 1930) 203. 8 escape that first known dwelling, to build for ourselves the home-and thereby the life-we most desire. The popular mythology ofhome is endless: there is a proverb for every occasion relating to "home sweet home." "There's no place like home," people have been insisting for generations, because "home is where the heart is," and in the end: "east, west, home's best." Home, historically, has always been a lauded and idealized location, regarded as one oflife's absolute necessities. In the nineteenth century, for example, Robert Southey declared: "Show me a man who cares no more for one place than another, and I will show you in that same person one who loves nothing but himself Beware ofthose who are homeless by choicel'" Robert Louis Stevenson (one ofGreene's favourite writers, as well as a relative on his mother's side ofthe family: see SL 50, 143) offers a last wish: "Be it granted to me to behold you again in dying, / Hills ofhome!";' this need ultimately to return home is echoed elsewhere in Stevenson's work: "Here he lies where he longed to be; / Home is the sailor, home from the sea, / And the hunter home from the hill.'''' Similarly, from Walter Scott (Greene's childhood favourite: see SL 41) comes the question: Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himselfhath said, This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath ne'er within him bum'd, As home his footsteps he hath tum'd, From wandering on a foreign strand! ...5 2 Robert Southey, The Doctor (1812; London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longman, 1849) 81. 3 Robert Louis Stevenson, "To S. R. Crockett," Songs ofTravel, Collected Poems, ed. Janet Adam Smith, 2nd ed. (London: Hart-Davis, 1970) 284. 4 Robert Louis Stevenson, "Requiem," Underwoods, Collected Poems 130. Greene also has Aunt Augusta misquoting these lines in one ofhis own novels, Travels With My Aunt 73. 5 Walter Scott, The Layofthe Last Minstrel, The Poetical Works ofSir Walter Scott (London: Frederick Warne, nd) 35. 9 This traditionally accepted attitude to home is sentimental and simplistic; in reality the ideal ofthe warm, happy family home-to which one may always return to find a welcome, and to enjoy the ordinary luxuries of"fires and food and the wind shut outside" iliA203)-is often difficult to live up to, and offers very little comfort to the man or woman left for some reason without a home, roots or family. In modem times, home has become a much more complicated affair.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • {FREE} the Confidential Agent: an Entertainment
    THE CONFIDENTIAL AGENT: AN ENTERTAINMENT PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Graham Greene | 272 pages | 22 Jan 2002 | Vintage Publishing | 9780099286196 | English | London, United Kingdom The Confidential Agent: An Entertainment PDF Book Graham Greene. View all 3 comments. I am going to follow this up with The Heart of the Matter. Neil Forbes Holmes Herbert This edition published in by Viking Press in New York. This wistful romance is one of Greene's other masterstrokes of plotting; he is refreshingly unabashed about any pig-headed question of decency and he lets this romance flow in seamlessly and incidentally into the narrative to lend it a real heart of throbbing passion. Shipping to: Worldwide. Buy this book Better World Books. Seller information worldofbooksusa Not in Library. Clear your history. The confidential agent: an entertainment , The Viking Press. In a small continental country civil war is raging. It has a fast-moving plot, reversals of fortune, and plenty of action. It is not exactly foiling a diabolical conspiracy perpetuated by a grand, preening super-villain or sneaking behind enemy lines. Looking for a movie the entire family can enjoy? The Power And The Glory was a deliberate exercise in exploring religion and morality, and Greene did not expect it to sell very well. Edit Did You Know? Well, it is. So, despite a promising start and interesting plot, the story itself loses grip on a number of occasions because there is little chemistry, or tension, between the characters - not between D. So he writes this book in the mornings, then writes the "serious" novel in the afternoons; whilst helping dig trenches on London's commons with the war looming.
    [Show full text]
  • 'Bishop Blougram's Apology', Lines 39~04. Quoted in a Sort of Life (Penguin Edn, 1974), P
    Notes 1. Robert Browning, 'Bishop Blougram's Apology', lines 39~04. Quoted in A Sort of Life (Penguin edn, 1974), p. 85. 2. Wqys of Escape (Penguin edn, 1982), p. 58. 3. Ibid., p. 167. 4. Walter Allen, in Contemporary Novelists, ed. James Vinson and D. L. Kirkpatrick (Macmillan, 1982), p. 276. 5. See 'the Virtue of Disloyalty' in The Portable Graham Greene, ed. Philip Stratford (Penguin edn, 1977), pp. 606-10. 6. See also Ways of Escape, p. 207. Many passages of this book first appeared in the Introductions to the Collected Edition. 7. A Sort of Life, p. 58. 8. Ways of Escape, p. 67. 9. A Sort of Life, pp. 11, 21. 10. Collected Essays (Penguin edn, 1970), p. 83. 11. Ibid., p. 108. 12. A Sort of Life, pp. 54-5. 13. Ibid., p. 54n. 14. Ibid., p. 57. 15. Collected Essays, pp. 319-20. 16. Ibid., p. 13. 17. Ibid., p. 169. 18. Ibid., p. 343. 19. Ibid., p. 345. 20. Philip Stratford, 'Unlocking the Potting Shed', KeT!Jon Review, 24 (Winter 1962), 129-43, questions this story and other 'confessions'. Julian Symons, 'The Strength of Uncertainty', TLS, 8 October 1982, p. 1089, is also sceptical. 21. A Sort of Life, p. 80. 22. Ibid., p. 140. 23. Ibid., p. 145. 24. Ibid., p. 144. 25. Ibid., p. 156. 26. W. H. Auden, 'In Memory ofW. B. Yeats', 1940, line 72. 27. The Lawless Roads (Penguin edn, 1971), p. 37 28. Ibid., p. 40. 29. Ways of Escape, p. 175. 137 138 Notes 30. Ibid., p.
    [Show full text]
  • Norman Macleod
    Norman Macleod "This strange, rather sad story": The Reflexive Design of Graham Greene's The Third Man. The circumstances surrounding the genesis and composition of Gra­ ham Greene's The Third Man ( 1950) have recently been recalled by Judy Adamson and Philip Stratford, in an essay1 largely devoted to characterizing some quite unwarranted editorial emendations which differentiate the earliest American editions from British (and other textually sound) versions of The Third Man. It turns out that these are changes which had the effect of giving the American reader a text which (for whatever reasons, possibly political) presented the Ameri­ can and Russian occupation forces in Vienna, and the central charac­ ter of Harry Lime, and his dishonourable deeds and connections, in a blander, softer light than Greene could ever have intended; indeed, according to Adamson and Stratford, Greene did not "know of the extensive changes made to his story in the American book and now claims to be 'horrified' by them"2 • Such obscurely purposeful editorial meddlings are perhaps the kind of thing that the textual and creative history of The Third Man could have led us to expect: they can be placed alongside other more official changes (usually introduced with Greene's approval and frequently of his own doing) which befell the original tale in its transposition from idea-resuscitated-from-old­ notebook to story to treatment to script to finished film. Adamson and Stratford show that these approved and 'official' changes involved revisions both of dramatis personae and of plot, and that they were often introduced for good artistic or practical reasons.
    [Show full text]
  • Visual Theologies in Graham Greene's 'Dark and Magical Heart
    Visual Theologies in Graham Greene’s ‘Dark and Magical Heart of Faith’ by Dorcas Wangui MA (Lancaster) BA (Lancaster) Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2017 Wangui 1 Abstract Visual Theologies in Graham Greene’s ‘Dark and Magical Heart of Faith’ This study explores the ways in which Catholic images, statues, and icons haunt the fictional, spiritual wasteland of Greene’s writing, nicknamed ‘Greeneland’. It is also prompted by a real space, discovered by Greene during his 1938 trip to Mexico, which was subsequently fictionalised in The Power and the Glory (1940), and which he described as ‘a short cut to the dark and magical heart of faith’. This is a space in which modern notions of disenchantment meets a primal need for magic – or the miraculous – and where the presentation of concepts like ‘salvation’ are defamiliarised as savage processes that test humanity. This brutal nature of faith is reflected in the pagan aesthetics of Greeneland which focus on the macabre and heretical images of Christianity and how for Greene, these images magically transform the darkness of doubt into desperate redemption. As an amateur spy, playwright and screen writer Greene’s visual imagination was a strength to his work and this study will focus on how the visuality of Greene’s faith remains in dialogue with debates concerning the ‘liquidation of religion’ in society, as presented by Graham Ward. The thesis places Greene’s work in dialogue with other Catholic novelists and filmmakers, particularly in relation to their own visual-religious aesthetics, such as Martin Scorsese and David Lodge.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction
    Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Graham Greene (ed.), The Old School (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934) 7-8. (Hereafter OS.) 2. Ibid., 105, 17. 3. Graham Greene, A Sort of Life (London: Bodley Head, 1971) 72. (Hereafter SL.) 4. OS, 256. 5. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Gollancz, 1937) 171. 6. OS, 8. 7. Barbara Greene, Too Late to Turn Back (London: Settle and Bendall, 1981) ix. 8. Graham Greene, Collected Essays (London: Bodley Head, 1969) 14. (Hereafter CE.) 9. Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads (London: Longmans, Green, 1939) 10. (Hereafter LR.) 10. Marie-Franc;oise Allain, The Other Man (London: Bodley Head, 1983) 25. (Hereafter OM). 11. SL, 46. 12. Ibid., 19, 18. 13. Michael Tracey, A Variety of Lives (London: Bodley Head, 1983) 4-7. 14. Peter Quennell, The Marble Foot (London: Collins, 1976) 15. 15. Claud Cockburn, Claud Cockburn Sums Up (London: Quartet, 1981) 19-21. 16. Ibid. 17. LR, 12. 18. Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1980) 62. (Hereafter WE.) 19. Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps (London: Heinemann, 1962) 11. (Hereafter JWM). 20. Christopher Isherwood, Foreword, in Edward Upward, The Railway Accident and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) 34. 21. Virginia Woolf, 'The Leaning Tower', in The Moment and Other Essays (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974) 128-54. 22. JWM, 4-10. 23. Cockburn, 21. 24. Ibid. 25. WE, 32. 26. Graham Greene, 'Analysis of a Journey', Spectator (September 27, 1935) 460. 27. Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation (New York: Viking, 1977) 228. 28. ]WM, 87, 92. 29. Ibid., 272, 288, 278.
    [Show full text]
  • Graham Greene and the Idea of Childhood
    GRAHAM GREENE AND THE IDEA OF CHILDHOOD APPROVED: Major Professor /?. /V?. Minor Professor g.>. Director of the Department of English D ean of the Graduate School GRAHAM GREENE AND THE IDEA OF CHILDHOOD THESIS Presented, to the Graduate Council of the North Texas State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS By Martha Frances Bell, B. A. Denton, Texas June, 1966 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. FROM ROMANCE TO REALISM 12 III. FROM INNOCENCE TO EXPERIENCE 32 IV. FROM BOREDOM TO TERROR 47 V, FROM MELODRAMA TO TRAGEDY 54 VI. FROM SENTIMENT TO SUICIDE 73 VII. FROM SYMPATHY TO SAINTHOOD 97 VIII. CONCLUSION: FROM ORIGINAL SIN TO SALVATION 115 BIBLIOGRAPHY 121 ill CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION A .narked preoccupation with childhood is evident throughout the works of Graham Greene; it receives most obvious expression its his con- cern with the idea that the course of a man's life is determined during his early years, but many of his other obsessive themes, such as betray- al, pursuit, and failure, may be seen to have their roots in general types of experience 'which Green® evidently believes to be common to all children, Disappointments, in the form of "something hoped for not happening, something promised not fulfilled, something exciting turning • dull," * ar>d the forced recognition of the enormous gap between the ideal and the actual mark the transition from childhood to maturity for Greene, who has attempted to indicate in his fiction that great harm may be done by aclults who refuse to acknowledge that gap.
    [Show full text]
  • The Modern World Through the Luminous Path of Prose Fiction: Reading Graham Greene’S a Burnt-Out Case and the Confidential Agent As Dystopian Novels
    Nebula 6.2 , June 2009 The Modern World through the Luminous Path of Prose Fiction: Reading Graham Greene’s A Burnt-out Case and The Confidential Agent as Dystopian Novels. By Ayobami Kehinde What an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery…. Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotisms, evil - or else an absolute ignorance (Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter, 1948: 117) Graham Greene was undoubtedly one of the most gifted and acclaimed novelists of the War/Post-war era in Britain. His novels reflect a constant search for new novelistic modes of expression capable of visualizing the disillusionment and malaise of the modern world. According to Waldo Clarke (1976), an enduring trait of Greene’s fiction is the willingness to look at the repulsive face of the twentieth century. Since literature mostly reflects the mood of its age and enabling contexts, Greene’s fiction dwells on the conflicts and pains of the modern world. The central burden of this discourse is to prove that Greene’s novels steadily progressed in his bold use of the convention of dystopian fiction. It has been proved elsewhere that Greene’s The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter are quintessential existential dystopian novels (See: Ayo Kehinde, 2004). However, in this present paper, an attempt is made to study more closely the dystopian features and political and ideological implications of the deployment of this convention in Greene’s The Confidential Agent and A Burnt-out Case .
    [Show full text]
  • Eng Book2002
    Author Title Place of Pub. Publisher Date ISBN London, Great Maugham, Somerset W. Encore Britain Heinemann 1951 Maugham, Somerset W. The Constant Wife New York, US Doubleday & Company, INC. 1926/1927 Maugham, Somerset W. A Writer's Notebook New York, US Doubleday & Company, INC. 1949 Ibsen, Henrik A Doll's House New York, US Stage and Screen 1997 Gentry, Curt J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets New York, US Norton 1991 Browning, John and Gentry, Curt John M. Browning American Gunmaker New York, US Doubleday & Company, INC. 1964 Bennett, Cerf. A At Random the Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf New York, US Random House, INC. 1977 Ernest Hemingway By Line New York, US Charles Scribner's Sons 1956/1967 Hotchner A.E. Papa Hemingway New York, US Random House, INC. 1955/1966 Ernest Hemingway Islands in the Stream New York, US Charles Scribner's Sons 1970 Ernest Hemingway A Moveable Feast New York, US Charles Scribner's Sons 1964 Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises New York, US Modern Library 1926 Ross, Lillian Portrait of Hemingway New York, US Simon and Schuster 1950/1961 W.W. Norton & Company, Gentry, Curt Frame-up New York, US INC 1967 London, Great Greene, Graham The Confidential Agent Britain William Heinemann. LTD 1939/1952 London, Great Greene, Graham Stamboul Train Britain William Heinemann. LTD 1932/1951 London, Great Greene, Graham A Burnt-Out Case Britain William Heinemann. LTD 1960/1961 Greene, Graham The 3rd Man New York, US The Viking Press 1949/1950 Wilder, Billy and Diamond, I.A.L. The Apartment and the Fortune Cookie New York, US Praeger 1971 Commander Hasting Japanese Letters: Eastern Impressions of London, Great Berkeley, R.N.
    [Show full text]
  • The Mystery of Evil in Five Works by Graham Greene
    W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 1984 The Mystery of Evil in Five Works by Graham Greene Stephen D. Arata College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Arata, Stephen D., "The Mystery of Evil in Five Works by Graham Greene" (1984). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539625259. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-6j1s-0j28 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Mystery of Evil // in Five Works by Graham Greene A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of English The College of William and Mary in Virginia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Stephen D. Arata 1984 APPROVAL SHEET This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts /;. WiaCe- Author Approved, September 1984 ABSTRACT Graham Greene's works in the 1930s reveal his obsession with the nature and source of evil in the world. The world for Greene is a sad and frightening place, where betrayal, injustice, and cruelty are the norm. His books of the 1930s, culminating in Brighton Rock (1938), are all, on some level, attempts to explain why this is so.
    [Show full text]
  • The Power and the Glory to Monsignor Quixote
    Davis: Figures In Greene’s Carpet Graham Greene Studies Volume 1 24 remain unaware of them. Otherwise I think Figures In my imagination would dry up.” He did not reread his novels because “I know I would Greene’s Carpet: come across all too many repetitions due The Power and quite simply to forgetting what I had written before. I’ve not the slightest wish to have my The Glory to nose rubbed onto ‘the pattern in the carpet’.”3 Since Greene can no longer be bothered Monsignor by critical meddling, which in any case he regarded as legitimate, I’ll discuss the pat- Quixote tern I have found, one drawn from Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven.” I’m Robert Murray Davis thinking not of “the labyrinthian ways,” which furnished the American-imposed title The 2007 Graham Greene of The Power and the Glory that Greene International Festival disliked. It is not inapt, but more apropos are these lines, from which I have tried In the patently autobiographical novel unsuccessfully to remove the theological The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn implications: Waugh has Mr. Pinfold maintain that “most men harbour the germs of one or two Now of that long pursuit books; all else is professional trickery of Comes on at hand the bruit; which the most daemonic of the masters— That Voice is round me like a bursting Dickens and Balzac even—were flagrantly sea: “And is thy earth so marred, guilty;” indeed, he envies “painters who are Shattered in shard on shard?”4 allowed to return to the same theme time and time again, clarifying and enriching Many if not most of his novels and until they have done all they can with it.”1 entertainments—if Greene’s old and inter- Graham Greene did not cite Waugh, but mittently discarded distinction is worth he did concede that he might be “a two or preserving—deal with the theme of pursuit three book man.” 2 through a marred world, from The Man The figure in Waugh’s carpet—to use the Within through A Gun for Sale, Brighton phrase of Henry James, whom both men Rock, The Power and the Glory and its admired—is obvious even to the casual reader.
    [Show full text]
  • IN Ronald J. Ambrosetti a Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School
    A STUDY OP THE SPY GENRE IN RECENT POPULAR LITERATURE Ronald J. Ambrosetti A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OP PHILOSOPHY August 1973 11 ABSTRACT The literature of espionage has roots which can be traced as far back as tales in the Old Test­ ament. However, the secret agent and the spy genre remained waiting in the wings of the popular stage until well into the twentieth century before finally attracting a wide audience. This dissertation analyzed the spy genre as it reflected the era of the Cold War. The Damoclean Sword of the mid-twentieth century was truly the bleak vision of a world devastated by nuclear pro­ liferation. Both Western and Communist "blocs" strove lustily in the pursuit of the ultimate push-button weapons. What passed as a balance of power, which allegedly forged a détente in the hostilities, was in effect a reign of a balance of terror. For every technological advance on one side, the other side countered. And into this complex arena of transis­ tors and rocket fuels strode the secret agent. Just as the detective was able to calculate the design of a clock-work universe, the spy, armed with the modern gadgetry of espionage and clothed in the accoutrements of the organization man as hero, challenged a world of conflicting organizations, ideologies and technologies. On a microcosmic scale of literary criticism, this study traced the spy genre’s accurate reflection of the macrocosmic pattern of Northrop Frye’s continuum of fictional modes: the initial force of verisimili­ tude was generated by Eric Ambler’s early realism; the movement toward myth in the technological romance of Ian Fleming; the tragic high-mimesis of John Le Carre' and the subsequent devolution to low-mimesis in the spoof; and the final return to myth in religious affir­ mation and symbolism.
    [Show full text]
  • ONE HUNDRED BOOKS Blackwell
    S rare books ’ ONE HUNDRED BOOKS Blackwell Blackwell’S rare books CATALOGUE B180 Blackwell’s Rare Books 48-51 Broad Street, Oxford, OX1 3BQ Direct Telephone: +44 (0) 1865 333555 Switchboard: +44 (0) 1865 792792 Email: [email protected] Fax: +44 (0) 1865 794143 www.blackwell.co.uk/ rarebooks Our premises are in the main Blackwell’s bookstore at 48-51 Broad Street, one of the largest and best known in the world, housing over 200,000 new book titles, covering every subject, discipline and interest, as well as a large secondhand books department. There is lift access to each floor. The bookstore is in the centre of the city, opposite the Bodleian Library and Sheldonian Theatre, and close to several of the colleges and other university buildings, with on street parking close by. Oxford is at the centre of an excellent road and rail network, close to the London - Birmingham (M40) motorway and is served by a frequent train service from London (Paddington). Hours: Monday–Saturday 9am to 6pm. (Tuesday 9:30am to 6pm.) Purchases: We are always keen to purchase books, whether single works or in quantity, and will be pleased to make arrangements to view them. Auction commissions: We attend a number of auction sales and will be happy to execute commissions on your behalf. Blackwell’s online bookshop www.blackwell.co.uk Our extensive online catalogue of new books caters for every speciality, with the latest releases and editor’s recommendations. We have something for everyone. Select from our subject areas, reviews, highlights, promotions and more.
    [Show full text]