Heresy and Heterotopia in Works by Lawrence Durrell: Alexandria to Angkor Wat

Heresy and Heterotopia in Works by Lawrence Durrell: Alexandria to Angkor Wat gathers new essays by international scholars who examine heretical concepts and heterotopian counter-spaces in Durrell’s thought and writing. The volume includes studies of texts set in locations from the Mediterranean to Cambodia, with spatial focus ranging from the Egypt of The Alexandria Quartet (and of Anatole France’s Thaïs) to the scattered locations of The Avignon Quintet, with stops along the way for the island books and other treatments of wandering and exile in poetry as well as prose. The contributors approach Durrell’s texts from a variety of perspectives, philosophical and intertextual, architectural and historical, mystical and digital. In so doing, they expose the deeper echoes set off by his wide-ranging literary production and map out the metaphysical, literary, and aesthetic connections that account for Durrell’s impact on our understanding of those twentieth-century social and cultural paradigms that foreshadow the disruptions of today’s world.

Isabelle Keller-Privat is professor at the University Toulouse Jean Jaurès where she teaches British literature, travel writing, poetry, and translation.

Anne R. Zahlan is professor emerita at Eastern Illinois University where she teaches courses in twentieth-century British and post-colonial literature.