Panic Spring: A Romance

Lawrence Durrell. Ed. James Gifford. Intro. Richard Pine

First published in 1937, two years after Durrell took up residence on the Greek island Kerkyra, Panic Spring broke with the realist tradition in 1930s novels and shows the young author’s first attempts to extend High Modernist innovations in rural and personal landscapes. Cubist, surrealist, and imagist techniques merge with rural life and the peasant village that an international group of expatriates are led to by a curiously Pan-like boatman. Unavailable for seven decades, this new edition of Panic Spring shows Durrell’s emerging passion for Mediterranean life and the Greek world as well as his first attempts to articulate a political-aesthetic direction distinct from his peers, George Orwell and W.H. Auden. Under the shadow of financial and political ruin, on the verge of revolution and war, the one chance summer depicted in Panic Spring will make readers reconsider the impetus and interests behind Durrell’s late modernist masterpieces, The Alexandria Quartet, The Black Book, and Prospero’s Cell.

Pied Piper of Lovers

Lawrence Durrell. Ed & Intro. James Gifford

Durrell’s first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, was published in 1935, shortly after he left England to live abroad until his death in 1990. As an autobiographical Künstlerroman, it traces Walsh Clifton’s Anglo-Indian childhood and his struggles to negotiate a life between “mother” India and “father” England. The trauma of leaving India for an alien home propels the novel’s concerns with colonial life and its wounds, transitioning from an idyllic rural world to London and Bloomsbury in the 1920s. Pied Piper of Lovers draws keenly from Durrell’s own life and charts the emotional experiences that would drive the rest of his career. For these reasons, Durrell never allowed republication, and the novel was largely lost in the London Blitz. Pied Piper of Lovers prompts significant reconsideration of the impetus and political tensions behind Durrell’s late modernist masterpieces, The Alexandria Quartet, The Avignon Quintet, and Bitter Lemons. This new edition allows readers to reevaluate Durrell’s complex role as a colonial writer in a postcolonial world by emphasizing his irony, privileges, and bitterness for a life always lived in-between.

The Henry Miller - Herbert Read Letters: 1935-58

Ed. James Gifford

This book collects the correspondence between Herbert Read and Henry Miller, ancillary writings by Read, and my extensive critical revision to the development and ideological underpinning of Anglo-American Surrealism. I also reconstruct the literary network that developed around both authors before and in the wake of the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition. Ancillary materials include Read's related poetry "The End of A War" and his critical work on Miller.

Culture and the State: Landscape and Ecology

Eds. James Gifford & Gabrielle Zezulka-Mailloux

In 1989 some proclaimed the imminent universal triumph of a particular state form -- the modern liberal state. Since then, others proclaim the imminent demise of the modern nation state under advancing globalization. Yet modern states continue to be formed -- from the former Yugoslavia to the new East Timor. One thing is clear in these developments. Despite the global promotion of science and commerce, culture in various forms had and has a major if not central role in state formation, from ancient times to the present. The four volumes of Culture and the State address all these issues, and more. Organized around a set of flexible themes, the series considers the role of culture variously defined -- high and low, elite and popular, local and global, historical and contemporary -- in the creation, maintenance, transformation, and demise of states.

Culture and the State: Disability Studies and Indigenous Studies

Eds. James Gifford & Gabrielle Zezulka-Mailloux

Culture and the State: Nationalisms

Eds. James Gifford & Gabrielle Zezulka-Mailloux

Culture and the State: Alternative Interventions

Eds. James Gifford & Gabrielle Zezulka-Mailloux