Book News: Graham Greene's aesthetics and form

Between Form and Faith: Graham Greene and the Catholic Novel

BY MARTYN SAMPSON

Fordham UP, 2021
ISBN: 9780823294671
https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823294671/between-form-and-faith/

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.

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• Using a provocative blend of literary theory and recent Christian theology, this book upholds the radical intersection of the religious and the secular in the fiction of Graham Greene, one of England's finest writers.
• Explores Greene according to issues of form and content in an in-depth and radically new way. While much critical attention has focused on the thematics of Greene’s fiction, whether religious or secular, its form has not received sustained analysis.
• Demonstrates and dramatizes how Greene can actually have a significant impact on polarized critical methodologies. This serves to raise the status not only of Greene, but also potentially that of other religious writers, too.
• Deconstructs different kinds of prejudice among critics and readers whose dispositions are secular or religious in nature, Catholic and otherwise by considering how fiction relates not only to broad intellectual debates, but also to the minutiae of human relationships.

"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

"Here is a book of genuine intellectual heft. In his analysis of Graham Greene, Martyn Sampson brings together the insights of contemporary critical theory with those of modern theology to turn the notion of a ‘Catholic Novel’ on its head, treating faith not as a body of beliefs external to the fictions and so to be affirmed or denied, but as a dimension of the novels’ imagined worlds. This insightful and innovative book should become essential reading for literary and theological scholars." — Richard Greene, University of Toronto

Martyn Sampson earned his PhD 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.