Durrell deciphered
January 29th, 2015
James Gifford , an Associate Professor of English and director of the university core at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Vancouver, has edited From the Elephant’s Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings (University of Alberta Press $34.95), a collection of 38 previously unpublished or out-of-print essays and letters by Lawrence Durrell, renowned for the Alexandrian Quartet novels. Gifford has also held academic posts at Simon Fraser and Victoria Universities. He holds a BA, English from Simon Fraser University and a Ph.D, English from the University of Alberta. His abiding academic interests include Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Elizabeth Smart, T.S. Eliot, Robert Duncan, Aidan Higgins and related authors. Previously he published Personal Modernisms: Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes (University of Alberta Press $34.95) in 2014 that examines the “lost generation” of writers of the 1930s and 1940s. Gifford examined the anti-authoritarian quality of contemporaries Alex Comfort, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Durrell, J.F. Hendry, Henry Miller, Elizabeth Smart, Dylan Thomas, and Henry Treece to forge a link between Late Modernist and postmodernist literature.
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