Dr. Chris Hull (University of Nottingham, UK) has been awarded a British Studies Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin (USA) in order to study the Graham Greene Collection.
He is one of two guest speakers at the Graham Greene International Festival 2009 to be honoured in this way, and his one-month residency at Austin will be undertaken between June 2010 and August 2011.
Despite the fact that Latin America was the setting for half of Graham Greene’s foreign-based novels, there has been little investigation into the writer’s representation and views of each country’s politics and wider inter-American relations. Taking a predominantly political and historical rather than literary approach, Dr. Hull will analyse Greene’s Cold War Latin American novels and assorted correspondence related to the countries, where these works were set. He will focus on Our Man in Havana (Batista’s Cuba), The Comedians (Papa Doc’s Haiti) and The Honorary Consul (Argentine/Paraguayan dictatorship). His cross-disciplinary methodology will also engage with the novelist’s views on dictatorship across the political spectrum, from Fulgencio Batista, François Duvalier and Alfredo Stroessner on the Right, to Fidel Castro on the Left. It is possible that this project may widen to include study of The Quiet American, another key Cold War novel, and one in which Greene proved to be remarkably prescient about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Such research could also encompass the 1984 travelogue Getting to Know the General in order to analyse Greene’s friendship with the maverick socialist dictator of Panama, Omar Torrijos.
At the Festival 2009 Dr. Hull gave the first annual talk under the heading of New Research on Graham Greene. His title was “Prophecy and Comedy in Havana: Greene’s ‘entertainment’ and the reality of British diplomacy in Cuba”, and his talk is summarised in the blog post on 22nd November 2009.
He is one of two guest speakers at the Graham Greene International Festival 2009 to be honoured in this way, and his one-month residency at Austin will be undertaken between June 2010 and August 2011.
Despite the fact that Latin America was the setting for half of Graham Greene’s foreign-based novels, there has been little investigation into the writer’s representation and views of each country’s politics and wider inter-American relations. Taking a predominantly political and historical rather than literary approach, Dr. Hull will analyse Greene’s Cold War Latin American novels and assorted correspondence related to the countries, where these works were set. He will focus on Our Man in Havana (Batista’s Cuba), The Comedians (Papa Doc’s Haiti) and The Honorary Consul (Argentine/Paraguayan dictatorship). His cross-disciplinary methodology will also engage with the novelist’s views on dictatorship across the political spectrum, from Fulgencio Batista, François Duvalier and Alfredo Stroessner on the Right, to Fidel Castro on the Left. It is possible that this project may widen to include study of The Quiet American, another key Cold War novel, and one in which Greene proved to be remarkably prescient about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Such research could also encompass the 1984 travelogue Getting to Know the General in order to analyse Greene’s friendship with the maverick socialist dictator of Panama, Omar Torrijos.
At the Festival 2009 Dr. Hull gave the first annual talk under the heading of New Research on Graham Greene. His title was “Prophecy and Comedy in Havana: Greene’s ‘entertainment’ and the reality of British diplomacy in Cuba”, and his talk is summarised in the blog post on 22nd November 2009.