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.”

Durrell's best-known work fused Western notions of time and space with Eastern metaphysics. Very little has been written about Durrell's work before the Second World War. With A Smile in His Mind's Eye, Ray Morrison seeks to redress this neglect.

The prize-winning biography of the celebrated author of the Alexandria Quartet and the Avignon Quintet: an “elegant and meticulous . . . treat” (Kirkus Reviews). A New York Times Notable Book Born in colonial India in 1912, Lawrence Durrell established his literary reputation as a citizen of the Mediterranean. After attending school in England, Durrell escaped the country he dubbed “Pudding Island” for the Greek island of Corfu, only to make another escape—this time from Nazi invasion—to Egypt. His experiences in wartime Alexandria led to a quartet of novels, beginning with Justine, that are collectively considered some of the great masterpieces of postwar fiction. Durrell’s peripatetic life, which eventually took him to the South of France, fed his work with the richness and drama of his various adoptive homes. A man of protean talents, Durrell is celebrated for his fiction and poetry, as well has his highly regarded translations, essays, and travel literature. In researching this authorized biography, Ian S. MacNiven traveled over a period of twenty years from India to California, interviewing hundreds of individuals and visiting all but one of the many places Durrell lived. The result is an intimate portrait of a literary titan that was awarded a prize by the French city of Antibes for the year’s best study on Durrell.

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For both novice and experienced book collectors, provides the physical and publication details necessary to identify first editions by the American and English authors most likely to be collected. Addresses the problems of the rarity and expense of more comprehensive bibliographies, and collectors' lack of access to reference libraries when they are on book searches far from home. Arranged alphabetically by author. No index. Distributed in the US by Ashgate. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR