The Entertainments of Late Modernism: Graham Greene and the Career Criminal

Abstract

This essay argues that by responding to the formal experiments of the early modernists without subscribing entirely to their aesthetic aims, Graham Greene's Brighton Rock serves as an exemplary instance of late modernism, offering an account of criminal subjectivity that blends the modernist critique of identity with the narrative conventions of twentieth-century crime and detective fiction. Utilizing the form of the psychological case study to articulate how a career criminal views his identity largely in terms of the conventions of crime fiction, Greene illustrates how late modernism reaffirms the value of a critically maligned popular genre while grappling with the aesthetic paradigms of early modernism.