Modernism's Missing Myth: A Reception History of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory.

This paper uses a reception history approach to argue that Graham Greene's novel The Power and the Glory should be considered a modernist text. The intense but varied affective responses of readers, along with the mythic status they attribute to the work, reveal that the novel has long been read both within and as a response to a modernist framework. Furthermore, reader responses all point to the same tension within the novel: the collision of a traditional and specific religious creed, Catholicism, with the thematic uncertainty and fragmentation of literary modernism. This tension is Greene's contribution to the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]