Introduction

To set out on a sustained exploration of G. K. Chesterton’s relationship to literary modernism might seem a wild-goose chase worthy of one of his own quixotic protagonists. Chesterton’s accounts closely anticipate Simon Dentith’s critical exposition of the ‘comic and destabilising’ tradition of European parodic literature, which passes ‘from Francois Rabelais, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and on to James Joyce’s Ulysses’. Chesterton’s litany of extravagant slights inhabits the terrain of Rabelais, the exemplary practitioner of sublime vulgarity in the Western canon and the inspiration for Mikhail Bakhtin’s famous exposition of the carnivalesque in European literature and culture. Graham Greene had drawn attention to an equally marked stylistic correspondence, noting the curious fact that ‘a generation that appreciates Joyce finds for some reason Chesterton’s equally fanatical play on words exhausting’. Hugh Kenner’s ‘analogical perception’ and Greene’s ‘fanatical play’ offer a suggestive pathway through the ‘critical muddle’ at hand.