Graham Greene's Catholic Imagination

Much has been written about Graham Greene's relationship to his Catholic faith and its privileged place within his texts. His early books are usually described as "Catholic Novels" - understood as a genre that not only uses Catholic belief to frame the issues of modernity, but also offersCatholicism's vision and doctrine as a remedy to the present crisis in Western civilization. Greene's later work, by contrast, is generally regarded as falling into political and detective genres. In this book, Mark Bosco argues that this is a false dichotomy created by a narrowly prescriptiveunderstanding of the Catholic genre and obscures the impact of Greene's developing religious imagination on his literary art.

Mark Bosco, S.J. is Assistant Professor of English and Theology at Loyola University Chicago.