Abstract
Abstract
In early 1948, Graham Greene, V. S. Pritchett, and Elizabeth Bowen worked together on a three-way ‘conversation’ about the social value of the writer—Why Do I Write? Their discussion took its cue from a British economic crisis triggered by the expense of supporting the British occupation of Germany and Austria, informed by the socialist government’s adoption of a policy of ‘equality of sacrifice’. As Greene and Pritchett argue from contrasting positions of financial advantage and disadvantage, a polemical stance on the relative merits of literature and film opens, via a provocative argument about political disloyalty, into Greene’s concurrent work on the treatment for The Third Man. The chapter close-reads the mesh of Shakespearian reference, notably Macbeth and King Lear, that sustains this argument in both texts, revealing Greene’s position—against Pritchett—as a defence of film and a claim of community with the defeated population of Vienna.
Publisher
Oxford University PressOxford
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