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Durrell and the City commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Alexandria Quartet with a collection of fourteen new essays by a group of international scholars and critics. The collection provides a critical consideration of Durrell's urban landscapes, from the London of his early novels to Avignon during World War II in his last great series, while focusing on the place that made him famous--the city of Alexandria--in order to provide a reassessment of his career and achievement.
Through his use of Gnostic beliefs, Durrell destabilizes our notions of the "real" and suggests that the civilization to emerge out of the ruins of a devastated Europe will not be Christian, but Quincunxial. Durrell's aesthetic and thematic concerns establish him as a significant, indeed central, voice in twentieth-century British literature. His career, which spans over five decades, links the British High Modernists with the Postmodernists.
This book offers an accessible critical introduction to the work of Graham Swift, one of Britain's most significant contemporary authors. Through detailed readings of his novels and short stories from The Sweet Shop Owner to The Light of Day, Daniel Lea lucidly addresses the key themes of history, loss, masculinity and ethical redemption, to present a fresh approach to Swift.
A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945-2000 serves as an extended introduction and reference guide to the British and Irish novel between the close of World War II and the turn of the millennium. Covers a wide range of authors from Samuel Beckett to Salman Rushdie Provides readings of key novels, including Graham Greene’s ‘Heart of the Matter’, Jean Rhys’s ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ and Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘The Remains of the Day’ Considers particular subgenres, such as the feminist novel and the postcolonial novel Discusses overarching cultural, political and literary trends, such as screen adaptations and the literary prize phenomenon Gives readers a sense of the richness and diversity of the novel during this period and of the vitality with which it continues to be discussed
Ranging from the turn of the nineteenth century to the last few years of the twentieth century, The Swarming Streets explores the representation of London in the last century through some of the major writers who have made it the foundation of their work. The natural companion to recent major histories and biographies of the metropolis, students and researchers alike will find major new essays on Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Storm Jameson, E. Nesbit, Julian Barnes, Iain Sinclair, Graham Swift, B. S. Johnson, and Andrea Levy and others. Drawing on a rich variety of critical approaches, each essay is distinct as well as contributing to an overall analysis of literary representations of twentieth-century London.
This collection of essays on Graham Swift’s fiction brings together the perspectives of renowned Swift scholars from around the world. Authors look at the swift’s oeuvre from different interpretative angles, combining a variety of critical and theoretical approaches. This book covers all of Swift’s fiction, including his novels and short stories; special emphasis, however, is on his most recent books. By approaching Swift’s work from a number of perspectives, the volume offers a synthetic overview of his literary output. In particular, it searches for thematic and formal continuities between his early and more recent fiction, and attempts to emphasize its new developments and interests.
This book provides a comprehensive compilation of essays on the relationship between formal experimentation and ethics in a number of generically hybrid or "liminal" narratives dealing with individual and collective traumas, running the spectrum from the testimonial novel and the fictional autobiography to the fake memoir, written by a variety of famous, more neglected contemporary British, Irish, US, Canadian, and German writers. Building on the psychological insights and theorizing of the fathers of trauma studies (Janet, Freud, Ferenczi) and of contemporary trauma critics and theorists, the articles examine the narrative strategies, structural experimentations and hybridizations of forms,...
Lawrence Durrell excelled in a great variety of genres: poetry, drama, travel books, humorous writings, translations, critical essays, philosophical essays, character sketches, and, above all, genre- and culture-transforming experimental novels. In keeping with Durrell's multifaceted career and the centrality of his experiments, the essays in this collection use a variety of literary approaches to the diversity of Durrell's contributions to literature, illuminating four major dimensions of Durrell's writing.
The essays in On Miracle Ground represent a collaborative attempt to assess the place of Lawrence Durrell in twentieth-century fiction.
Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet is regarded as the central work in his fiction. It has provoked critical commentary ever since the appearance of its individual volumes – Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive and Clea (1959) and the publication in a one-volume edition in 1962. Scores of Master’s and PhD dissertations have been written since the 1960s on this most compelling and provocative novel. Today, The Alexandria Quartet stimulates critical discussion in works addressing the city, Durrell’s representation of Alexandria, the theory of relativity, the role of memory, the recurring feature of the doppelgänger and the presence of the Gothic uncanny; his frequent references to D.H. Lawrence; his treatment of women characters; his interest in Gnosticism; and his own description of the Quartet as “a strange mixture of sex and the secret service”. This volume of essays addresses all these themes, and brings together the mature work of four scholars on this central work of Durrell’s fiction, together with two essays on its sequels, Tunc-Nunquam (1968-70) and The Avignon Quintet (1974-85).