City Writing In Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet

As a most celebrated English novelist, Lawrence Durrell has gained great reputation throughout the English-speaking countries, while in China his works have been seldom studied. His most admired work The Alexandria Quartet is a tetralogy which explores the multi-perspective nature of truth and reality. To some degree it is a faithful representation of the city of Alexandria in reality, but it is also a reconstruction and remodelling of the real city, which is unavoidably imprinted with the writer’s city experience, city complex as well as his literary practices.By applying a combined method of cultural studies, social-historical criticism and textual analysis, this thesis attempts to conduct a study of city writing in Durrell’s Quartet in a given context of the religious, colonial and social background of Alexandria at Durrell’s time.Besides an introduction and a conclusion, the thesis consists of three chapters.The introduction comprises a brief introduction to Lawrence Durrell and The Alexandria Quartet, a literature review, the theoretical framework and the significance of the study.The first chapter is a microcosmic yet overall research on Durrell’s city experience and city complex. To illustrate Durrell’s city complex, a survey of representatives of city writing in British literature will be conducted first. It is the tradition of city writing that paves the way for Durrell’s literary practices. During Durrell’s wandering life from India to many other countries all over the world, all those people he meets and all those ups and downs he experiences not only offer inexhaustible materials for his literary creation, but also influence his view of modern city and modern people’s way of life, which consequently shapes his unique city complex.The second chapter focuses on Durrell’s reconstruction of Alexandria. Alexandria is not only a physical place imbued with exotic charm, but also a city exuding distinctive temperament. In Durrell’s writing, Alexandria is a city with history, with the past frequently invading the present; a city of desire, with sensuous experiences and political intrigues being intertwined with each other; a city as heterotopia, where multiple cultures and mystical elements coexist in a carnivalesque atmosphere.The third chapter aims to examine how the multiple facets of Alexandria are reconstructed, through a combined analysis of narrative strategies and stylistic features. Durrell skilfully infiltrates his outlook of relativity in the structuring of the palimpsestic layers, questions the reliability of one-sided truth through the employment of space-time-memory continuum and displays a bewitching city through the poetic landscape-tones.The Conclusion points out that all facets of Durrell’s Alexndria are products of his city complex and deep concerns for modern society. Through the stylistic use of metaphoric and painterly imagery within the palimpsest of memory, and the vivid description of interaction between city and people, Durrell presents a unique city and her fantastic landscape. Additionally, Durrell’s Alexandria is presented on the basis of Einstein’s theory of relativity and Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, displaying Durrell’s insight into human nature and depth of philosophical thoughts. All in all, Durrell’s reconstruction of Alexandria represents his idealized cityscape and reflects his deep humanistic concern.