Lawrence Durrell's orientalist depiction of the Arab City in the Alexandria Qurtet

Abstract EN

In the Western tradition of narrating the Orient, there is a deliberate stress on those signs that mark it as "other".

In his important book Orientalism (1978), Edward Said argues that Western thought and scholarship regarding the Orient, the Arabs, and Islam in particular, have been largely determined by a canon, a network of prejudices and unexamined assumptions that serve to bolster a Western identity as much as identifying and stressing the non-Western as "other".

Said has introduced the structure of Orientalism as a 'European representation of the Orient and has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience" (1-2).

Through the perspectives set forward by Said, the study of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet reveals the treatment of one oriental icon - Alexandria, the Arab city - deliberately depicted as 'other'.

The emphasis is on the features the Durrellian discourse has in common with the Orientalist discourse Said defines in his work