Heresy and Heterotopia in Works by Lawrence Durrell

Heresy and Heterotopia in Works by Lawrence Durrell examines heretical elements in Durrell’s thought and writings and Foucauldian explorations of his treatments of place and space. It links Lawrence Durrell’s fiction, travel writing, and poetry in offering new theoretical appreciations of Durrell’s response to orthodox epistemologies.

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.