The essays in this volume represent attempts at understanding Lawrence Durrell's work, by means of the Greece thathe creates as part of his fictional and poetic universe. One of the great writers of the twentieth century, Durrell's novels, poetry, and essays reflect his passionate love affair with the Greek world, both ancient and modern. During his lifetime, he lived on Corfu, Rhodes, Cyprus, and in Alexandria, Egypt. His sojourns in each of these places were marked by wars, broken love affairs, financial difficulties, as well as great friendships and artistic success. Above all, he absorbed the Hellenic culture, by learning Greek and residing as a native, thereby allowing the spirit of each of his adopted homes to inspire his art, notably in his most famous work, The Alexandria Quartet. A believer that "We are children of our landscape," he claims: "I have been heavily stamped by Greece, ancient and modern. . . . The trouble is that before you can understand me, you must first appreciate Greece."

Durrell's appreciation of Greece is grounded in his belief that the Mediterranean is the "matrix of civilization." The Hellenic world functions in his work as a fertile, vibrant crossroads of cultures, philosophies, and peoples. Imaginatively in his poetry and fiction, Durrell shapes this landscape into a mental construct in which "sunlight and inner light meet." He recounts the experience of entering Greece as "one might enter a dark crystal; the form of things becomes irregular, refracted." It is fitting, therefore, that the perspectives collected in this volume reflect this prismatic, elusive world. Editor Anna Lillios has gathered together essays that take different approaches to Durrell's life and art from personal reminiscences by Durrell's only living child, Penelope Durrell Hope, and Dur-rell's friends, Greek poet Nanos Valaoritis, John Leatham, Penelope Tremayne, and Byron Raizis; to Ian and Susan MacNiven's interview with Durrell's sister, Margaret; to critical articles authored by an international group of scholars that explore postcolonial, feminist, and poststructuralist themes in Dur-rell's oeuvre. All of these perspectives show how the Greek landscape, with its brilliant sunlight and clear seas, symbolizes an other-worldly realm of magic, mystery, and poetry that readers all over the world have grown to appreciate and love. It is here that Durrell has chosen to construct a bridge between "The world of the human passions, the sort of shadow world in which we live, and . . . the world of the Gods, which is the potential world which we all carry in us." His Greek world, with its ancient and modern references, ultimately becomes the site of a spiritual quest that corresponds to the philosophical concerns of our contemporary world.