Re-reading The Alexandria Quartet of Lawrence Durrell (Durrell Studies 8)

Re-reading The Alexandria Quartet of Lawrence Durrell (Durrell Studies 8)
Author: Richard Pine
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2023-08-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1527528499

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).

Silence and Psychology in Claude Vincendon’s Golden Silence (Durrell Studies 9)

Silence and Psychology in Claude Vincendon’s Golden Silence (Durrell Studies 9)
Author: Richard Pine
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2023-10-16
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1527543293

The distinguished French-Alexandrian novelist Claude Vincendon died in 1967, leaving unpublished her Golden Silence (1964), the typescript of which was recently discovered. The book focusses on the life of a mute girl who has been cursed by the Evil Eye, and her life in her native Alexandria, in England and Australia. The text has been edited, with commentaries, by Sibylle Vincendon (the author’s niece), Richard Pine and David Green. The exploratory essays contained in the present book address Claude Vincendon’s life; the background to her aristocratic family in Alexandria; her marriage to Irishman Tim Forde and their life together in Ireland, Australia and Israel; Claude’s second marriage to Lawrence Durrell, and their working life together in Cyprus and France; the inter-connection between their literary works; Claude’s first three novels, published in the 1960s by Faber and Faber; the social and political conditions in post-war Egypt, Britain and Australia; the construction of Golden Silence and the psychological character of silence itself; the phenomenon of the Evil Eye; and the concept of Nemesis which permeates Golden Silence.

Durrell Re-read

Durrell Re-read
Author: James M. Clawson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2016-06-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611478472

Reading the twelve major novels of Lawrence Durrell, this study argues for their consideration as a single major project, an opus, marked by themes of liminality and betweenness. As major texts of mid-twentieth-century literature, repeatedly earning nominations for the Nobel Prize, Durrell’s work has attracted renewed critical attention since his centenary in 2012. This study shows the thematic unity of the opus in five areas. First, by disrupting expectations of love and death and by fashioning plural narrators, works in the opus blend notions of the subject and the object. Second, in their use of metafictional elements, the texts present themselves as neither fiction nor reality. Third, their approach to place and identity offers something between the naturalistic and the human-centric. Fourth, though the texts’ initial concerns are engaged with understanding the past and preparing for a future, they all resolve in something like the present. And fifth, though the novels reject many aspects of modernism, they reside nevertheless between the poles of modernism and postmodernism. Shared with other writers, including T.S. Eliot and Henry Miller, as early as the 1940s, Durrell’s plans for his major works of fiction remained consistent through the publication of the last novel in 1985, and these plans show the need to consider the twelve major works as a unitary whole.

The Making of Refugee Memory

The Making of Refugee Memory
Author: Emilia Salvanou
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2024-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1036411117

The Making of Refugee Memory is the first English-language history to address the way in which Asia Minor refugees in the period 1912-1924 sustained their memories of their “lost homeland” in the context of their new locations in the state of Greece. Building on the previous work of historians and sociologists in relation to the “Anatolian Catastrophe”, Emilia Salvanou provides an original in-depth case-study of the Thracian Centre and its work in supporting and encouraging the identities of refugees by means of the journal Thrakika and other conduits of memory. It is a notable ground-breaking addition to the historiography of modern Greece and the perception of the status and meaning of refugees in the post-imperial world.

Clea

Clea
Author: Lawrence Durrell
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2012-06-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1453261443

DIVDIVThe final installment of the Alexandria Quartet, hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “one of the most important works of our time”/divDIV /divDIVYears after his liaisons with Justine and Melissa, Darley becomes immersed in a relationship with Clea, a bisexual artist. The ensuing chain of events transforms not only the lovers, but the dead as well, and leads to the series’ brilliant and unexpected resolution. /divDIV /divDIVPraised by Life as among the “most discussed and widely admired serious fiction of our time,” Clea carries on Durrell’s assured and unwavering style, and confirms the series’ standing as a resounding masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook contains a new introduction by Jan Morris./div /div

Justine

Justine
Author: Lawrence Durrell
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2011-05-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0143119249

"Demands comparison with the very best books of our century . . . A truly important writer . . . His people, his places are masterly."― New York Times Book Review Durrell's masterpiece is onne of the world's greatest romances, rich in political and sexual intrigue. This seductive tale of four tangled lovers in wartime Egypt is set in the city of Alexandria once home to the world's greatest library, attracting scholars dedicated solely to the pursuit of knowledge. But on the eve of World War II, the obsessed characters in this mesmerizing novel find that their pursuits lead only to bedrooms in which each seeks to know-and possess-the other.

Balthazar

Balthazar
Author: Lawrence Durrell
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2012-06-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1453261427

DIVDIVThe deeply affecting second novel of theAlexandria Quartet, which boldly questions perception and the nature of contemporary love/divDIV /divDIVIn Alexandria, Egypt, in the years before World War II, Durrell’s narrator, Darley, seeks to fully understand his sexual obsession with two women: the infamous Justine, and Melissa, a dancer. In Darley’s conversations with Balthazar, a doctor and mystic, it soon becomes clear that Darley’s fixation is more complex and ominous than either man could have imagined. Layered and unflinching, Balthazar is a poignant examination of the modern psyche, and a study of a world where love can become consumed by deceit. /divDIV /divDIVThis ebook contains a new introduction by Jan Morris./div/div

Lawrence Durrell’s Woven Web of Guesses (Durrell Studies 2)

Lawrence Durrell’s Woven Web of Guesses (Durrell Studies 2)
Author: Richard Pine
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2021-02-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1527566668

This volume presents a number of original essays on aspects of Lawrence Durrell which have not previously been discussed. Durrell (1912-1990) was the ground-breaking author of The Alexandria Quartet, Tunc-Nunquam (The Revolt of Aphrodite) and The Avignon Quintet and of many plays, volumes of poetry and essays. This volume, by one of the world’s foremost experts on Durrell’s life and work, explores his early literary connections with Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Alfred Perlès and David Gascoyne in topics such as surrealism and psychology. It features new insights into Durrell’s approach to popular literature, Greek politics and sexual orientation, and establishes Durrell’s mental states from an examination of his private notebooks. It presents a composite portrait of a writer obsessed with the themes of identity, creativity, sexuality and freedom.

Re-Reading the Alexandria Quartet of Lawrence Durrell (Durrell Studies 8)

Re-Reading the Alexandria Quartet of Lawrence Durrell (Durrell Studies 8)
Author: Richard Pine
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-10
Genre:
ISBN: 9781527528482

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).

Prospero's Cell

Prospero's Cell
Author: Lawrence Durrell
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2012-06-12
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1453261656

From a member of the real-life family portrayed in The Durrells in Corfu, this memoir of the idyllic Greek island is “among the best books ever written” (The New York Times). Before Lawrence Durrell became a renowned novelist, poet, and travel writer, he spent four youthful years on Corfu, an island jewel with beauty to match the long and fascinating history within its rocky shores. While his brother, Gerald, was collecting animals as a budding naturalist, Lawrence fished, drank, and lived with the natives in the years leading up to World War II, sheltered from the tumult that was engulfing Europe—until finally he could ignore the world no longer. Durrell left for Alexandria, to serve his country as a wartime diplomat, but never forgot the wonders of Corfu. In this “brilliant” journey through that idyllic time and place, Durrell returns to the land that made him so happy, blending his love of history with memories of his adventures there (The Economist). Like the blue Aegean, Prospero’s Cell is deep and crystal clear, offering a perfect view straight to the heart of a nation.