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.

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).

IMAGES deals with the discourse of cultural encounters within the context of social co-existence. Within this scope, the project deals with both verbal and non-verbal communication and focuses on the thematic fields of cultural encounter, poverty, and migration. This volume thus offers readers a cross-section of current research both on the perception of urbanity and on contemporary and historical representations of the city, coming from a variety of fields in people's daily lives. (Series: Anthropology / Ethnologie - Vol. 57) [Subject: Sociology, Cultural Studies, Urban Studies, Poverty Studies, Migration Studies]

This book offers the first in-depth analysis of Lawrence Durrell’s entire poetic opus, from his early collections in the 1940s up to his last one published in 1973. Thirty years of Durrellian poetry are brought together in order to unveil the genesis of Durrell’s writing, both poetic and fictional, drawing links to his novels and residence books, which he kept writing at the same time. Durrell thus appears as first and foremost one of the greatest late modernist poets whose literary and epistemological investigations are to be understood in the light of a worldwide network of literary brotherhoods including T. S. Eliot, Michael Fraenkel, Henry Miller, and David Gascoyne. Simultaneously, this book shows why Durrell must also be read as the heir to the greatest English romantic poets (Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth) as well as to the French symbolists and modernists (from Baudelaire to Nerval, Valéry, and Cendrars).This comparative approach opens up a brand new perspective on Durrell that has not yet been broached by North American and English scholarship. The symbolic patterns, the stylistic ploys, and the aesthetic and philosophic tenets that characterize Durrell’s poetics account for the necessary back-and-forth reading that connects prose and poetry, the fictional and the lyrical, the descriptive and the abstract. Poetry excerpts, extracts from his residence books, novels, and essays highlight not only Durrell’s complex literary strategies but also the ontological quest of a writer who, although never at home with the world he lived in, strove to create a life-world, what semiologists call the “Umwelt.”

In this second volume of his study of the Anglo-Irish novelist Lawrence Durrell (following the appearance in 1988 of The Dandy and the Herald: Manners, Mind and Morals from Brummell to Durrell Richard Pine examines in detail Durrell's unique contribution to the development of the modern novel, concentrating in particular on the evidence of Durrell's private notebooks and diaries. Pine's twenty-year friendship with Burrell has resulted in an intimate portrait of a singular mind whose extraordinary career, both as a writer and as a British colonial official, is hallmarked by the creation of 'the Heraldic Universe', an imaginative realm within which the artist reigns supreme.

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).

Lawrence Durrell’s position as one of the twentieth century’s leading novelists is continually being enlarged and revised. This book presents unusual and unorthodox explorations of Alexandria, the city at the heart of Durrell’s writing, his family relationships, his biographer Michael Haag, and his affinity with such diverse writers as Rilke and Virgil. In particular, it offers an insight into Durrell’s emotions and sensibilities in elaborating his Sicilian Carousel and a penetrating and totally unique reading of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet in the light of the art and landscape of ancient Egypt.

In this volume an attempt is made to tackle Hellenism as a global and transcultural entity. Through an array of essays, this book constitutes a comparative study of various literary, cultural and artistic trends as these develop throughout the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries on both sides of the Atlantic. Having been designed with the general as well as the specialized reader in mind, this book will prove to be a valuable guide to scholars, undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as to a broad spectrum of readers with an interest in comparative literature, cultural history, history of the classical heritage, transatlantic studies, English and American romantic, modernist and postmodernist narratives. Its diverse material falls under the umbrella terms of “English Hellenisms” and “American Hellenisms” with the intention of enhancing intercultural dialogue and understanding. By embracing multivocality, as proven by the number of articles it contains, this book proves the tenacity, diachronic and intercontinental appeal of Hellenism at the era of multiculturalism and globalization.