• The Corfiot Landscape and Lawrence Durrell’s Pilgrimage: The Colo-nial Palimpsest in ‘Oil for the Saint; Return to Corfu’

    Author(s):
    James Gifford (see profile)
    Date:
    2003
    Group(s):
    LLC 20th- and 21st-Century English and Anglophone, Postcolonial Studies, TC Postcolonial Studies
    Subject(s):
    British literature
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    Postcolonial English literature
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6183423B
    Abstract:
    Durrell subverts the colonial mindset that allows him to define and delineate a foreign landscape for foreign readers, while nonetheless engaging in an attempt at reconciliation—a pilgrimage—between his various adopted ‘homes.’ Focusing on “Oil for the Saint,” I argue that a close examination of the physical landscape of Corfu shows that Durrell ‘dupes’ the trusting reader into a series of misconceptions. By performing the role of the colonial traveler meekly fulfilling his conciliatory pilgrimage to an imagined home and real shrine, Durrell’s narratorgives a disturbingly exact rendition of the tourist-reader’s expectations of such a voyage and place. In so doing, the text subverts the reader’s easy acceptance of the travel narrative as a means to ‘knowing’ a place or people, while it leaves the reader with an uncanny perception of himself or herself mirrored in the foreign ‘deus loci.’
    Metadata:
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    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. Date:
    2003
    Journal:
    In-between: Essays & Studies in Literary Criticism
    Volume:
    11
    Issue:
    2
    Page Range:
    181 - 196
    ISSN:
    0971-9474
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    Attribution-NonCommercial
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