Reinterpreting the black book : A postcolonial a pproach

Abstract EN

since its first publication in 1938, Lawrence Durrell's the black book had attracted much criticism that tended to focus on its form, style, and significance in anticipating Durrell's later mega novel the Alexandria quartet(1962) a linguistically rich and thematically layered novel, the black book continues to offer the critic many a venues of investigation, including its political and historiographical implication as they are played out in an implicit critique of colonialism, which is basically related to the aesthetics of the novel.

This study intends to reinterpret Durrell's the black book as a critique of colonialism.

Reading Durrell's work from a post _colonial perspective shows how Durrell writes of the interconnections of the private and the public, the personal and the political, the aesthetic and the historiographical in the black book, which is at once an act of revelation and resistance, a wakeup to and for personal, artistic, and political freedom.