The Resonance of Conflict: Genre and Politics in the Transatlantic Reception of The Quiet American

Abstract

"This article focuses on Britain, the US, France, and Sweden - arguably the four most important countries for Greene’s reception in the 1950s, and with distinctly different positions on The Quiet American’s political backgrounds, both in terms of the conflict in Vietnam and the Cold War more generally - and on three roughly divided periods: first, the immediate reception of the novel in 1955 and 1956; second, the renewed debates that followed Joseph Mankiewicz’s film adaptation in 1958; and third, the long period extending from the late 1960s onwards, defined in this context by the trauma of the Vietnam War. The latter is separable by certain events - such as the fall of Saigon in 1975, for example - but is crucially cohesive in how it maps a shift from what could provisionally be called biographical and political readings to historical ones. Taken as a whole, this series of contextually affected readings show that political backgrounds have resonated with not only what The Quiet American is taken to mean, but more pointedly what it is taken to be: a novel of love and war, or a historical document of conflict and ideology."