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Seventeen interpretative articles about the work of Durrell.
First major critical and analytical study of the English writer.
Novelist Lawrence Durrell's fondness for his adopted homeland of Greece led him to declare "I'm a Greek," and profoundly influenced his work. Attempting to capture the scope of the Greek world's relationship with Durrell's life and work, Lilios (English, U. of Central Florida) presents 22 papers that approach the topic from a range of perspectives. After a number of reminiscences of Durrell by family and friends, a set of essays are organized by place, examining Durrell's relationship with Corfu, Alexandria, Rhodes, and Cyprus. The remaining essays are grouped according to theme discussing such issues as the influence of myth and other "Greek inspirations" on Durrell's novels, poems, and other work. Distributed by Associated University Presses. Annotation ♭2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
He answers specific questions about most of his writings and indicates what he reconstructs as his intent in writing them.
From the olive trees of southern France to Gnostic cults in Egypt, a man and his lovers are invented and reinvented in this first volume of a great literary adventure. For British doctor Bruce Drexel, a return to Provence is bittersweet. Here, at a rustic chateau, he once fell in love with Sylvie, the Frenchwoman who would become his wife, and befriended her brother, Piers. The three made up a peculiar, potent ménage for years until Sylvie’s descent into madness and Piers’s suicide. As Drexel attends to Piers’s affairs, he becomes steeped in the memories of a spiritually transformational trip to Egypt; the band of intellectual confederates who used to be his intimate friends; and a three-sided love that became his reason for being. So begins Monsieur, the masterful first entry of Durrell’s Avignon Quintet, an infinite regress of memory and imagination that challenges the formal conventions of fiction.
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.
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.
In this new selection from the poetry of Lawrence Durrell (the first for thirty years), Peter Porter has drawn on the full range of the published work, from A Private Country (1943) to Vega (1973), and has provided a long overdue revaluation of Durrell's poetic career. In his detailed and generous introduction, Porter makes the case for A Private Country as one of the most accomplished debut collections of the twentieth century, and traces Durrell's preoccupations and poetic personality within the wider scene. The selection of poems makes its own strong case for the continuing power and originality of this attractive, metropolitan and wholly individual body of work.
In Bitter Lemons, Durrell tells the perceptive, often humorous, story of his experiences on Cyprus between 1953 and 1956-first as a visitor, then as a householder and teacher, and finally as Press Advisor to a government coping with armed rebellion. Here are unforgettable pictures of the sunlit villages and people, the ancient buildings, mountains and sea-and the somber political tragedy that finally engulfed the island.
A volume in the Writers and Their Work series, which draws upon recent thinking in English studies to introduce writers and their contexts. Each volume includes biographical material, an examination of recent criticism, a bibliography and a reappraisal of a major work by the writer.