Livia Or Buried Alive

Love and youth in the world, which ended with the Nazi War, are placed against the timeless backdrop of Provence. Both real and imaginary people enter the drama which is written by a member of the cast.

Through his use of Gnostic beliefs, Durrell destabilizes our notions of the "real" and suggests that the civilization to emerge out of the ruins of a devastated Europe will not be Christian, but Quincunxial. Durrell's aesthetic and thematic concerns establish him as a significant, indeed central, voice in twentieth-century British literature. His career, which spans over five decades, links the British High Modernists with the Postmodernists.

While England has been strengthened by a proud isolationism, she has simultaneously been enriched by the economic, social, and political complexities that have emerged as people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds have moved within her borders, or when her own citizens have emigrated among those foreigners to live or rule. This book explores the foreign element in English culture and the attempt by English writers from the early 19th to the mid 20th century to portray their complex and often ambiguous responses to that doubly foreign element among them: the foreign woman. While being foreign may begin with national or ethnic difference, the contributors to this book expand it to include other forms of alienation from a dominant culture, resulting from gender, race, class, ideology, or temperament. The many factors shaping English national identity—including British imperialism, immigration patterns, English family and social structures, and English common law—have been shaped by gender-related issues. Though not a prominent literary figure, the foreign woman in England has received increasingly critical attention in recent years as a psychological and sociological phenomenon. By beginning with Byron in the early 19th century and concluding with Lawrence Durrell in the 20th century, this study contributes to a more comprehensive vision of the foreign woman as she is portrayed by a number of British authors, including Shelley, Wordsworth, Charlotte Bronté, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and Anita Brookner.

"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 anti-authoritarian 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 or 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, anti-authoritarian artists, and the Personalist movement will also appreciate Gifford's fine editorial work.

This book provides a comprehensive compilation of essays on the relationship between formal experimentation and ethics in a number of generically hybrid or "liminal" narratives dealing with individual and collective traumas, running the spectrum from the testimonial novel and the fictional autobiography to the fake memoir, written by a variety of famous, more neglected contemporary British, Irish, US, Canadian, and German writers. Building on the psychological insights and theorizing of the fathers of trauma studies (Janet, Freud, Ferenczi) and of contemporary trauma critics and theorists, the articles examine the narrative strategies, structural experimentations and hybridizations of forms, paying special attention to the way in which the texts fight the unrepresentability of trauma by performing rather than representing it. The ethicality or unethicality involved in this endeavor is assessed from the combined perspectives of the non-foundational, non-cognitive, discursive ethics of alterity inspired by Emmanuel Levinas, and the ethics of vulnerability. This approach makes Contemporary Trauma Narratives an excellent resource for scholars of contemporary literature, trauma studies and literary theory.