The Language of Ethics and Community in Graham Greene's Fiction - by Paula Martín Salvan (Hardcover)

About the Book

"This book maps out the lexico-conceptual articulation of Greene's narrative dramatization of ethical situations. This main aim issues from three working hypotheses: in the first place, a reduced set of terms such as peace, despair, pity or commitment have a striking lexical recurrence in Greene's texts. They are considered here as keywords that articulate his discourse at a conceptual level. In the second place, those keywords are invested with narrative potential. They have the capacity to generate narrative situations and developments. In the third place, they articulate a particular narrative pattern. Such lexico-conceptual articulation is shaped mainly as ethical conflict dramatized in narrative form. Drawing on contemporary theories of community and ethics developed by Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, J. Hillis Miller or Derek Attridge, this book sets out to explore a recurrent narrative pattern in Greene's work, emerging from his personal use of the language of ethics and community"--

Book Synopsis

A study of Graham Greene's fiction from the perspective of ethics and community, focusing on the narrative pattern that emerges from the author's idiosyncratic use of keywords like peace, despair, compassion or commitment. This book explores their potential for the textual articulation of narrative conflict and the dramatization of the ethical.

Review Quotes

'Overall the book offers a remarkable account of the way Greene's work conveys complex ethical issues within a crystalline and compelling narrative structure and in a literary discourse that is simultaneously accessible, sophisticated and individual... a brilliant piece of work.' - Neil R. Sinyard, University of Hull, UK

About the Author

Paula Martín Salván is Associate Professor of English at the University of Córdoba, Spain. Her research interests include Modernist and Postmodernist fiction, literary and critical theory. Her current research focuses on the notion of community and its fictional construction. Her latest book is the co-edited volume Communtiy in Twentieth-Century Fiction (2013).