This is the first single-author study of the genres and roots of popular literature in its relation to film and television, exploring the effects of academic snobbery on the teaching of popular literature. Designed for classroom use by students of literature and film (and their teachers), it offers case studies in quest literature, detective fiction, the status of the outlaw and outsider, and the interdependence of self, other and the uncanny. It challenges perceived notions of, and prejudices against, popular literature, and affirms its connection with the deepest human experiences.

A Psychoanalytic Study of Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet: Exile and Return focuses on the dialogue created by literature and psychoanalysis in an individual’s quest to explore existential issues, such as a sense of belonging to a homeland and a recurring sense of the Uncanny (das unheimliche). Rony Alfandary explores Durrell’s attempt to recreate a sense of belonging to a homeland, which perhaps never existed but can be retraced and reinvented through writing. This book studies some issues present in Durrell’s work: the connection between biographical and fictional elements in the study of literature the influence of early Freudian theoretical themes upon the writer later influences including post-modern and hermeneutic theories The life and work of Lawrence Durrell can serve as a prototype of a man’s quest for meaning, in a world caught in turmoil in the period between and during WW2. The author’s psychoanalytic exploration of the work and its relevance to human experience today, shows how the themes Durrell dealt with remain relevant. Alfandary highlights the ways in which his usage of several author narrative styles exemplifies the divergent and often contradictory nature of "Truth", emerging rather as multi-layered, multi-voiced and often torn sense of human subjectivity. A Psychoanalytic Study of Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet: Exile and Return demonstrates Durrell’s strong influence by psychoanalytic thought and will appeal to both psychoanalytic and literary scholars.

This volume presents a number of original essays on aspects of Lawrence Durrell which have not previously been discussed. Durrell (1912-1990) was the ground-breaking author of The Alexandria Quartet, Tunc-Nunquam (The Revolt of Aphrodite) and The Avignon Quintet and of many plays, volumes of poetry and essays. This volume, by one of the world’s foremost experts on Durrell’s life and work, explores his early literary connections with Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Alfred Perlès and David Gascoyne in topics such as surrealism and psychology. It features new insights into Durrell’s approach to popular literature, Greek politics and sexual orientation, and establishes Durrell’s mental states from an examination of his private notebooks. It presents a composite portrait of a writer obsessed with the themes of identity, creativity, sexuality and freedom.

These essays represent a selection of 40 years’ commentary on the political dimensions of cultural life. They address the entire spectrum of culture, from theories of international communication to the provision of cultural and leisure facilities at local level. As a former consultant to the Council of Europe, the author has developed a penetrating insight into the decision-making process between local authorities and citizens’ groups, which is discussed in two seminal papers from the 1980s which pioneered the concept of Cultural Democracy. In addition, the book’s close readings of novels and plays by Irish and Greek writers explore the way that all writing and forms of self-expression have a political message and repercussions.

The distinguished French-Alexandrian novelist Claude Vincendon died in 1967, leaving unpublished her Golden Silence (1964), the typescript of which was recently discovered. The book focusses on the life of a mute girl who has been cursed by the Evil Eye, and her life in her native Alexandria, in England and Australia. The text has been edited, with commentaries, by Sibylle Vincendon (the author’s niece), Richard Pine and David Green. The exploratory essays contained in the present book address Claude Vincendon’s life; the background to her aristocratic family in Alexandria; her marriage to Irishman Tim Forde and their life together in Ireland, Australia and Israel; Claude’s second marriage to Lawrence Durrell, and their working life together in Cyprus and France; the inter-connection between their literary works; Claude’s first three novels, published in the 1960s by Faber and Faber; the social and political conditions in post-war Egypt, Britain and Australia; the construction of Golden Silence and the psychological character of silence itself; the phenomenon of the Evil Eye; and the concept of Nemesis which permeates Golden Silence.

Artificial Mythologies was first published in 1997. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Cultural critics teach us that myths are artificial. Cultural innovators use the artificial to make something new. In this exhilarating guide, Craig J. Saper takes us on an eye-opening tour of the process of cultural invention-willfully entertaining foolish, absurd, even fake, solutions as a way of reaching new perspectives on cultural problems. Saper deploys this method to reveal unsuspected connections among major cultural issues, such as urban decay, the dangers of television's power, family values, and conservative criticism of higher education. The model Saper uses builds on the later works of the revered French cultural critic Roland Barthes. These works, Saper argues, suggest poignant, playful, and productive ways of engaging dominant methodologies and mythologies. Artificial Mythologies shows us how, by allowing the artificial-our received ideas, common responses, and cultural mythologies-full play, we can arrive at provocative new solutions. The book demonstrates that the very conceptions of media and sociocultural issues that stymie innovation can be made to serve the cause of invention. Craig J. Saper is assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania.