Many Histories Deep: The Personal Landscape Poets in Egypt, 1940-45Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1995 - 246 Seiten The Second World War stranded a colony of British writers in Egypt, where they lived on the borderland of an alien culture and a distant British homeland. This study concentrates on four important poets - Keith Douglas, Lawrence Durrell, Bernard Spencer, and Terence Tiller - the journal with which they were associated, Personal Landscape, and the milieu of wartime Cairo. On the periphery of this group were, among others, Olivia Manning and G. S. Fraser, and the Greek exiles George Seferis and Elie Papadimitriou. Cairo's "unreality" - the war in the Western Desert, cultural otherness and the varied definitions of exile, the layers of a native and an imperial history, the currents of political propaganda, literary rivalries played out far from the metropolitan center - formed the background to the growth of these four distinct poetic voices, as well as the establishment of a magazine that promoted a modernist aesthetic and a canon that embraced contemporary Greek letters. |
Inhalt
| 15 | |
| 25 | |
| 34 | |
Personal Landscapes | 45 |
LITERARY SKIRMISHES | 53 |
Up the Blue The Passage of Keith Douglas | 66 |
Terence Tiller and the Customary Self | 93 |
Bernard Spencer The Quiet Exile | 114 |
After the Fact Creating and Recreating Egypt in The Alexandria Quartet | 162 |
Epilogue | 186 |
Wartime Egypt in Fiction Poetry and Memoir 19441994 | 196 |
Personal Landscape | 199 |
Notes | 203 |
Select Bibliography | 232 |
Index | 241 |
The Artist at His Papers Lawrence Durrell and the Poetry of Transformation | 140 |
Andere Ausgaben - Alle anzeigen
Häufige Begriffe und Wortgruppen
Aegean Islands Alamein Alexandria Quartet Anthology appeared Arab Artemis Cooper artist becomes Bernard Spencer British Council Bullen Cairo Cavafy chapter civilian Clea Collected Poems colonial Conon critical Cromer culture Darley dead death desert Douglas's Durrell's edited Egypt Egyptian Dancer elegy Empire England English European exile expatriate experience Faber Farouk fiction final Fuad G. S. Fraser George Seferis Greece Greek Heraldic Universe Ian Fletcher identifies identity imagination imperial John Justine Keith Bullen Keith Douglas Lampson later Lawrence Durrell Lehmann Collection letter literary Literature lives lover Mediterranean memoir memory Middle East Modern Mountolive Narouz narrative Nile novel Olivia Orient Orientalist Oxford Personal Landscape Personal Landscape group Personal Landscape poets poet's poetic Poetry London political postwar published Pursewarden Robert Liddell Robin Fedden Salamander seems Seferis sense sexual soldier speaker stanza Terence Tiller tion translations traveler University Press Verse voice wartime writers
Beliebte Passagen
Seite 82 - But she would weep to see today how on his skin the swart flies move; the dust upon the paper eye and the burst stomach like a cave. For here the lover and killer are mingled who had one body and one heart. And death who had the soldier singled has done the lover mortal hurt.
Seite 71 - ... enemies waiting at the edge of towns conceal a movement of live stones, the lizards with hooded eyes of hostile miraculous age. It is not snow on the green space of hilltops, only towns of white whose trees are populous with fruit and girls whose velvet beauty is handed down to them, gentle ornaments. Here I am a stranger clothed in the separative glass cloak of strangeness. The dark eyes, the bright-mouthed smiles, glance on the glass and break falling like fine strange insects. But from the...
Seite 103 - Flaubert's encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was 'typically Oriental'.
Seite 111 - ... and desert thistles in the tree's broken shade and the sea-glare: strange violent men, with dirty unfamiliar muscles, sweating down the brown breast, wanting girls and beer. The branches shake down sand along a crawling air, and drinks are miles towards the sun and Molly and Polly and Pam are gone. Waiting for my announcement, I feel neat and shy, foreign before their curious helplessness, innocence bought by action, like the, sea's amnesty: all my clean cleverness is tiny, is a loss; and it...
Seite 80 - ... have deceived; the dead men whom the wind powders till they are like dolls: they tonight rest in the sanitary earth perhaps or where they died, no one has found them or in their shallow graves the wild dog discovered and exhumed a face or a leg for food : the human virtue round them is a vapour tasteless to a dog's chops.
Seite 111 - They sit like shrubs among the cans and desert thistles in the tree's broken shade and the sea-glare: strange violent men, with dirty unfamiliar muscles, sweating down the brown breast, wanting girls and beer. The branches shake down sand along a crawling air, and drinks are miles towards the sun and Molly and Polly and Pam are gone. Waiting for my announcement, I feel neat and shy, foreign before their curious helplessness, innocence bought by action, like the sea's amnesty: all my clean cleverness...
Seite 87 - Words are my instruments but not my servants; by the white pillar of a prince I lie in wait for them. In what the hour or the minute invents, in a web formally meshed or inchoate, these fritillaries are come upon, trapped: hot-coloured, or the cold scarabs a thousand years old, found in cerements and unwrapped. The catch and the ways of catching are diverse. For instance this stooping man, the bones of whose face are like the hollow birds
Seite 91 - I only repeat what you were saying the shell and the hawk every hour are slaying men and jerboas, slaying the mind but the body can fill the hungry flowers and the dogs who cry words at nights, the most hostile things of all. But that is not new. Each time the night discards draperies on the eyes and leaves the mind awake I look each side of the door of sleep for the little coin it will take to buy the secret I shall not keep. I see men as trees suffering or confound the detail and the horizon. Lay...
Verweise auf dieses Buch
A Smile in His Mind's Eye: A Study of the Early Works of Lawrence Durrell Ray Morrison Eingeschränkte Leseprobe - 2005 |