Abstract:
A Post-Colonial Reading of Lawrence Durrell’s The Black Book
by
Dianne L. Vipond
T. S. Eliot described Lawrence Durrell’s first major novel, The
Black Book (1938), as “the first piece of work by a new English writer
to give me any hope for the future of prose fiction.” Durrell’s “agon,”
the first part of the tripartite literary plan he outlines in a letter
to Henry Miller in 1937, has not received as much critical treatment as
it deserves, perhaps because Durrell was always the literary visionary,
often so far ahead of his time that the critical aparatus with which to
approach his work had yet to be developed. Much of what has been
written about The Black Book tends to focus on its form as well as its
style and significance in anticipating his later maganovel, The Alexandria
Quartet. A linguistically rich and thematically layered novel, The
Black Book continues to offer the critic many avenues of investigation,
including its political and historiographic implications as they are played
out in an implicit critique of colonialism, which is intrinsically related
to the aesthetics of the
Deus Loci 7 (1999-2000): 110-125.
Back to Table of Contents.