Durrell Re-read: Crossing the Liminal in Lawrence Durrell's Major NovelsReading 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. |
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Several Durrell studies sought "the whole," but Clawson reveals something new: what produces the wholeness of Durrell's "opus." Durrell described Alexandria as "a hybrid, a joint," which tells us more of Durrell than Egypt. The wholeness of Durrell's works comes from this liminality, the joints that connect difference in a general arthrology. Clawson's conclusion is inescapable and important to modern British literature widely conceived: that Durrell's coherence lies not in continuity but in the contiguity of liminal moments of transition.
Contents
| 1 | |
Subject and Object | 11 |
Reality and Fiction | 37 |
City and World | 65 |
Past and Future | 95 |
Modern and Postmodern | 125 |
Common terms and phrases
Alexandria Quartet artistic Avignon Quintet Balth Balthazar beginning Benveniste Bergson Bergsonian Black Book Blanford Book’s Bruce calls Caradoc Charlock Clea Constance construction continuum creation culture Darley Darley’s Dasenbrock death describes desert Deus Loci Durrell writes Durrell-Miller Letters Durrell’s opus Einstein Faber and Faber Felix gipsies Gregory Gregory’s Henry Miller Herbert Herbrechter human imagination influence Iolanthe Journal NS Justine Kaczvinsky Key to Modern Künstlerroman Lawrence Durrell Lawrence Durrell Journal Lawrence Lucifer Lawrence Lucifer’s liminal literary literature living London MacNiven McHale Mediterranean memory Modern Poetry modernist modernist literature Mons Mountolive narrating narrative Nevertheless Nunq Nunquam past perspective postmodernism postmodernist present Pursewarden Quinx reader reading reality and fiction recognize relationship rell’s Revolt of Aphrodite robot seems selected fiction sense space Spengler story subject and object Sutcliffe Sutcliffe’s T. S. Eliot temporal tense tion transition Tunc understanding University Press Vipond Zahlan
Bibliographic information
| Title | Durrell Re-read: Crossing the Liminal in Lawrence Durrell's Major Novels |
| Author | James M. Clawson |
| Edition | illustrated |
| Publisher | Rowman & Littlefield, 2016 |
| ISBN | 1611478472, 9781611478471 |
| Length | 188 pages |
| Subjects | › › Literary Criticism / European / Eastern Literary Criticism / Modern / 20th Century |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |