A compassionate treatment of sin and redemption in Graham Greene's Brighton rock, The power and the glory, The heart of the matter and The end of the affair

Abstract

The new critical movement, 'American New Criticism', which emerged in the 1920s, established itself on the premise that when confronted with a text, one must not be concerned with context- historical, biographical, intellectual and so on, but 'solely with the "text in itself', with its language and organisation'. However, this critical practice was soon after theoretically challenged by another American 'movement' of the mid century, the 'Chicago School' of 'Neo-Aristotelians'. Wayne C. Booth, although a slightly later critic, acknowledged that he was a Chicago Aristotelian. In effect, his influential book, The Rhetoric of Fiction, refutes the practice of the American New Critics because in it he maintains that every writer, whether consciously or unconsciously, imposes his fictional world upon his readers. Booth's interpretation is crucial to my discussion of the four novels by Graham Greene which I have selected for this study.