Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts Collection

From The Man Within (1929) to The Captain and the Enemy (1988), Graham Greene engaged in a lifelong dialogue with Joseph Conrad''s political, psychological and melodramatic fictions. Repressing Conrad''s political anxieties, his early work displaces the protagonist''s existential dilemma into the form of the thriller or - alternatively -the ''Catholic'' novel. After The Quiet American (1955), however, Greene''s novels return to politics, introducing comic variations which transform Conrad''s ''masterplot'' into a mixed genre uniquely his own, a process charted in this book, the first full-length study of the subject.