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From the Elephant's Back

From the Elephant's Back

Collected Essays and Travel Writings

by Lawrence Durrell and James Gifford
Paperback
Publication Date: 06/03/2015

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"...the proverb says that whoever sees the world from the back of an elephant learns the secrets of the jungle and becomes a seer. I had to be content to become a poet."
--Lawrence Durrell

Best known for his novels and travel writing, Lawrence Durrell defied easy classification within twentieth-century Modernism. His anti-authoritarian tendencies put him at odds with many contemporaries--aesthetically and politically. However, thanks to a compelling recontextualization by editor James Gifford, these thirty-eight previously unpublished and out-of-print essays and letters reveal that Durrell's maturation as an artist was rich, complex, and subtle. Durrell fans will treasure this selection of rare nonfiction, while scholars of Durrell, Modernist literature, anti-authoritarian artists, and the Personalist movement will also appreciate Gifford's fine editorial work. Foreword by Peter Baldwin.

"Gifford's scholarly command of the archives shows--especially his working intimacy with the unpublished archived words of Durrell's editors, publishers, and collaborators. I have no doubt that this collection will serve as a starting point for any number of new critical ventures into the life and writing of Lawrence Durrell."
--Charles Sligh, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
"This collection has a straightforward ambition: to redirect the interpretive perspective that readers bring to Lawrence Durrell's literary works by returning their attention to his short prose." - From the Introduction

Best known for his novels and travel writing, Lawrence Durrell defied easy classification within twentieth-century modernism. His antiauthoritarian tendencies put him at odds with many contemporaries--aesthetically and politically. However, thanks to a compelling recontextualization by editor James Gifford, these 38 previously unpublished and out-of-print essays and letters reveal that Durrell's maturation as an artist was rich, complex, and subtle. This edition promises to open up new approaches to interpreting his more famous works. Durrell fans will treasure this selection of rare nonfiction, while scholars of Durrell, modernist literature, antiauthoritarian artists, and the Personalist movement will also appreciate Gifford's fine editorial work.

ISBN:
9781772120516
9781772120516
Category:
Travel writing
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
06-03-2015
Language:
English
Publisher:
University of Alberta Press
Country of origin:
Canada
Dimensions (mm):
228.6x152.4x27.94mm
Weight:
0.65kg
Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence Durrell was a British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. Born in 1912 in India to British colonial parents, he was sent to school in England and later moved to Corfu with his family - a period which his brother Gerald fictionalised in My Family and Other Animals, and which he himself described in Prospero's Cell. The first of Durrell's island books, this was followed by Reflections on a Marine Venus on Rhodes; Bitter Lemons, on Cyprus, which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize; and, later, The Greek Islands.

Durrell's first major novel, The Black Book, was published in 1938 in Paris, where he befriended Henry Miller and Anais Nin - and it was praised by T. S. Eliot, who published his poetry in 1943. A wartime sojourn in Egypt inspired his bestselling masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea) which he completed in his new home in Southern France, where in 1974 he began The Avignon Quintet. When he died in 1990, Durrell was one of the most celebrated writers in British history.

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