Where the Tigers Were : Travels Through Literary Landscapes

ISBN-13: 9781570033803 / Angielski / Twarda / 2001 / 160 str.

Don Meredith

Opis

From Venice to Vietnam, from the Welsh coast to Cairo, Don Meredith has traveled in the wake of twentieth-century writers, using their novels and poems as guides, as another wayfarer might turn to Fodor's or the Guide Bleu. Canvassing the works of authors especially attuned to a sense of place, he has gone in search of the backstreets, basilicas, cafes, piazzas, and countrysides that figured so powerfully in their writings. Part travelogue, part literary study, Where the Tigers Were is Meredith's account of these explorations into the impact of place in a dozen literary classics.

Meredith examines exile and creative vision in the work of expatriates who, with clarity and imagination, explored exotic landscapes -- Graham Greene, Lawrence Durrell, T. E. Lawrence, Karen Blixen, Thomas Mann, E. M. Forster, and Maria Thomas. Against these artists Meredith balances writers who tilled the literary soil of the places they grew up: the poets C. P. Cavafy and Dylan Thomas, the novelists Giorgio Bassani, Naguib Mahfouz, and Marguerite Duras. Bringing their poetry and prose into mutually illuminating conversation with the landscapes the authors made their own, Meredith vividly evokes each setting, animating it with a sense of its peculiar energy. The twelve narratives in Where the Tigers Were explore this fascinating intersection, offering fresh insights into the lives and works of writers and an engaging approach to both literature and travel.