Greene and Genre

Abstract

The novels Greene wrote during the 1930s and 1940s produced a discursive field that enabled interested critics to make various statements concerning his work within the institutional contexts that supported them. Greene’s continuing popularity and his association with the cinema—not only as a novelist whose work adapted easily to the screen, but also as a writer for hire and as the Spectator’s official film critic—prevented him from entering the pantheon of contemporary ‘serious’ novelists, but did not prevent critics like V.S. Pritchett and Evelyn Waugh from noting that Greene was attempting to do strange, intelligent, often serious things within genres that did not themselves constitute ‘serious literature. Still, his supporters, and even later critics like John Atkins, considered many of the genres in which Greene ostensibly worked somewhat déclassé, unable to sustain the sort of transformations he seemingly wrought upon them. As Ben Ray Redman had suggested apropos of Stamboul Train, Greene’s best efforts could only amount to very good current fiction because the writer’s perception of the genres strengths prompted him to introduce elements— contemporaneity, action, and suspense—that did not fit the mould of the timeless literary classic.