Richard Pine

Oscar Wilde (Gill's Irish Lives)

Greece Between East and West looks at the central geopolitical situation of Greece, and its pivotal role in the Balkans and the Levant. The trend towards “modernisation” and “westernisation” is examined in the light of traditional values in culture, language, history and politics which reflect Greece’s eastern legacy and the continuing presence of that legacy in contemporary society. It features original creative writing, an interview with a leading film-maker, provocative accounts of political and cultural agitation on the Aegean islands, aspects of Greek music and drama, plus historical accounts of Greek cities like Smyrna/Izmir and Alexandria, and the new phenomenon of China’s re-creation of the historic “Silk Road”. Additionally, Greece Between East and West features a Foreword by Roderick Beaton, one of the most distinguished scholars and commentators on Greek history and social affairs, and current Chair of the British School at Athens.

Culture and Geopolitics (Durrell Studies 7)

Greece Between East and West

A short biography of Oscar Wilde, the prolific 19th-century writer who was critically acclaimed in Ireland, England and America, but was imprisoned at the height of his success for gross indecency, due to having been involved in reckless homosexual affairs.

Oscar Wilde

Brian Friel and Ireland's Drama

Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland

The Thief of Reason

These essays represent a selection of 40 years’ commentary on the political dimensions of cultural life. They address the entire spectrum of culture, from theories of international communication to the provision of cultural and leisure facilities at local level. As a former consultant to the Council of Europe, the author has developed a penetrating insight into the decision-making process between local authorities and citizens’ groups, which is discussed in two seminal papers from the 1980s which pioneered the concept of Cultural Democracy. In addition, the book’s close readings of novels and plays by Irish and Greek writers explore the way that all writing and forms of self-expression have a political message and repercussions.

Essays on Cultural Politics, 1978-2018

The Quality of Life

Manners, Mind and Morals from Brummell to Durrell

The Dandy and the Herald

Will contribute greatly to an understanding of how Brain Friel's plays transmit meaning within the acoustic of the Irish cultural and political scene. His readings constantly deepen the sense of Friel's complexity and modernity--Seamus Heaney. This

The Art of Brian Friel

The Diviner

Vera Konidari

The condition of Greece, ever since its establishment as a sovereign state in 1830, has been the subject of intense international debate, centring on its pivotal role in the Balkans. This has been aggravated by Greece’s economic collapse in 2010 and by the ongoing refugee crisis, by environmental disasters, terrorism and the Macedonian question. This book’s analysis and assessment of Greek social, cultural and political life is trenchant, up-front and passionate, based on the author’s belief that one cannot love Greece without also mourning the fault-lines in bureaucracy and the dynastic politics which have dominated it since its inception. This book features a selection of the author’s “Letters from Greece” (from The Irish Times) and his “Eye of the Xenos”, from the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, in its entirety, in both English and a Greek translation, including columns which Kathimerini refused to print due to the nature of their political commentary.

The Eye of the Xenos, Letters about Greece (Durrell Studies 3)

This unique collection of work by Lawrence Durrell brings together a vast range of unpublished and ephemeral material spanning his entire writing career, illustrating the diversity, candour, depth of interests and humanity, humour, philosophical imagination and critical and aesthetic vision of one of the twentieth century’s leading poets and novelists. Illustrated throughout with photographs, cartoons by Lawrence and Nancy Durrell, manuscript notes by Durrell and memorabilia, Lawrence Durrell’s Endpapers and Inklings 1933-1988 provides the general reader, the specialist and the book collector with an unprecedented insight into Durrell’s creativity and literary craftsmanship. This volume contains: “Durrell on Miller” (his lifelong admiration for Henry Miller); “Dramas and Screenplays” (including Black Honey, his melodramatic farce on Baudelaire and his mistress, and his screen treatments for Cleopatra and for Oedipus the King); “Essays, Lectures and Review” (including “The Minor Mythologies”, Durrell's essay on popular literature and his 1974 lecture on James Joyce's Ulysses). It also includes “Incorrigibilia” (spoofs from the juvenile writer to the elderly sage, with Bromo Bombastes, Durrell's squib on Shaw's Black Girl, unavailable since its private publication in 1933) and “The Asides of Demonax”, Durrell's final valedictory notebook, crammed with aperçus, jokes and profound reflections on life, beauty and death.

Dramas, Screenplays, Essays, Incorrigibilia

Lawrence Durrell’s Endpapers and Inklings 1933-1988, Volume Two

This volume is a collection of Lawrence Durrell’s prose writings from his earliest years until shortly before his death. It is illustrated with photographs, cartoons by This unique collection of work by Lawrence Durrell brings together a vast range of unpublished and ephemeral material spanning his entire writing career, illustrating the diversity, candour, depth of interests and humanity, humour, philosophical imagination and critical and aesthetic vision of one of the twentieth century’s leading poets and novelists. Illustrated throughout with photographs, cartoons by Lawrence and Nancy Durrell, manuscript notes by Durrell and memorabilia, Lawrence Durrell’s Endpapers and Inklings 1933-1988 provides the general reader, the specialist and the book collector with an unprecedented insight into Durrell’s creativity and literary craftsmanship. This volume contains: “Durrell on Durrell” (the writer’s autobiographical essays); “The Artist's Eye” (detailing Durrell’s interest in the visual arts); and “Fictions”, including the unpublished The Magnetic Island and the unfinished novel “Sappho”. It also encompasses “Durrell at War” (letters and essays relating to World War 2) and “Spirit of Place” (essays and prefaces including a deleted chapter from Reflections on a Marine Venus, an account of a 1949 duty trip through Tito’s Yugoslavia, and in-depth surveys of the Cyprus situation in the 1950s).

Autobiographies, Fictions, Spirit of Place

Lawrence Durrell’s Endpapers and Inklings 1933-1988, Volume One

In this second volume of his study of the Anglo-Irish novelist Lawrence Durrell (following the appearance in 1988 of The Dandy and the Herald: Manners, Mind and Morals from Brummell to Durrell Richard Pine examines in detail Durrell's unique contribution to the development of the modern novel, concentrating in particular on the evidence of Durrell's private notebooks and diaries. Pine's twenty-year friendship with Burrell has resulted in an intimate portrait of a singular mind whose extraordinary career, both as a writer and as a British colonial official, is hallmarked by the creation of 'the Heraldic Universe', an imaginative realm within which the artist reigns supreme.

Lawrence Durrell: The Mindscape

This volume presents a number of original essays on aspects of Lawrence Durrell which have not previously been discussed. Durrell (1912-1990) was the ground-breaking author of The Alexandria Quartet, Tunc-Nunquam (The Revolt of Aphrodite) and The Avignon Quintet and of many plays, volumes of poetry and essays. This volume, by one of the world’s foremost experts on Durrell’s life and work, explores his early literary connections with Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Alfred Perlès and David Gascoyne in topics such as surrealism and psychology. It features new insights into Durrell’s approach to popular literature, Greek politics and sexual orientation, and establishes Durrell’s mental states from an examination of his private notebooks. It presents a composite portrait of a writer obsessed with the themes of identity, creativity, sexuality and freedom.

Lawrence Durrell’s Woven Web of Guesses (Durrell Studies 2)

A series of lectures for broadcast on RTE Radio 1 to mark the 150th anniversary of the Royal Irish Academy of Music. Contributors explore the development of composition, education, performance, broadcasting and the creation of an audience in Ireland between 1848 and 1998.

Music in Ireland, 1848-1998

This original study is the first major critical appraisal of Ireland’s post-colonial experience in relation to that of other emergent nations. The parallels between Ireland, India, Latin America, Africa and Europe establish bridges in literary and musical contexts which offer a unique insight into independence and freedom, and the ways in which they are articulated by emergent nations. They explore the master-servant relationship, the functions of narrative, and the concepts of nationalism, map-making, exile, schizophrenia, hybridity, magical realism and disillusion. The author offers many incisive answers to the question: What happens to an emerging nation after it has emerged?

Ireland and the Post-Colonial World

The Disappointed Bridge

Eve Patten

“The most terrible disaster that one group of human beings can inflict on another is war. Wars cause misery on an indescribable scale. Yet we go on doing it to one another, generation after generation. Why? Warfare is a recurrent and universal characteristic of human existence. The mythologies of practically all peoples abound in wars and the superhuman deeds of warriors, and pre-literate communities apparently delighted in the recital of stories about battles. Since our species became literate a mere 5,000 years ago, written history has mostly been the history of wars. Thousands who knew war evidently sickened of it and dreamt of lasting peace, expressing their vision in literature and art, in philosophy and religion. They imagined Utopias freed of martial ambition and bloodshed which harked back to the Golden Age of classical antiquity, to the Christian vision of a paradise lost, and to the Arcadia of Greek and Latin poetry, so richly celebrated in the canvases of Claude and Poussin. All these things bear eloquent testimony to the human longing for peace, but they have not triumphed over our dreadfully powerful propensity to war.” —from the Introduction by Anthony Stevens In this multi-disciplinary collection of essays on the manifestations of war in poetry, fiction, drama, music and documentaries, scholars and practitioners from an international context describe the transformation of the war experience into chronicles of hope and despair, from Herodotus up to the present day.

Literatures of War

730 million people—almost 10% of the world’s population—inhabit islands. One quarter of the states represented at the United Nations are islands. Islands constitute almost twenty percent of the total land area of Greece, and exhibit more significant aspects of biodiversity than other global contexts. They are both occasions of triumph and occurrences of catastrophe. Islands are both open and enclosed communities, points of arrival and departure. Islands exert a fascination for the visitor and generate, in the islander, both positive and negative mindsets. The romantic fallacies about self-sufficiency and insularity of islands are constantly challenged. This collection of essays by scholars from some of the world’s most compelling islands—Jersey, Ireland, Tasmania, Corfu, Ereikousa, Prince Edward Island, Malta—explores the psychology of islands, islanders and their visitors, the literatures they stimulate, and the scientific, ethical and biogeographical issues they present in an increasingly globalised world. Corfu, the home of Lawrence and Gerald Durrell in the 1930s, and host to literary and scientific enquiry, is the place where this collection was conceived, and occupies a central place in its discussions.

Psychology, Literature and Biodiversity

Islands of the Mind

The crossing of borders and frontiers between political states and between languages and cultures continues to inhibit and bedevil the freedom of movement of both ideas and people. This book addresses the issues arising from problems of translation and communication, the understanding of identity in hyphenated cultures, the relationship between landscape and character, and the multiplex topic of gender transition. Literature as a key to identity in borderland situations is explored here, together with analyses of semiotics, narratives of madness and abjection. The volume also examines the contemporary refugee crisis through first-hand “Personal Witness” accounts of migration, and political, ethnic and religious divisions in Kosovo, Greece, Portugal and North America. Another section, gathering together historical and current “Poetry of Exile”, offers poets’ perspectives on identity and tradition in the context of loss, alienation, fear and displacement.

Explorations in Identity, Exile and Translation (Durrell Studies 1)

Borders and Borderlands

This is the first single-author study of the genres and roots of popular literature in its relation to film and television, exploring the effects of academic snobbery on the teaching of popular literature. Designed for classroom use by students of literature and film (and their teachers), it offers case studies in quest literature, detective fiction, the status of the outlaw and outsider, and the interdependence of self, other and the uncanny. It challenges perceived notions of, and prejudices against, popular literature, and affirms its connection with the deepest human experiences.

A Student's Guide to Texts and Films

Minor Mythologies as Popular Literature

What is ‘creativity’? And what is ‘madness’? How far can we interpret an artist’s work through our knowledge of his or her mental state, and how far can we infer a mental state from a work of art? When does a work of art cease to be a personal statement by the artist and become a matter of public concern? The contributions to this book attempt to answer some of these questions. They come from a wide range of disciplines and experiences – a practising psychiatrist, a practising artist suffering from reactive depression, and critics working in literature, film, music and the visual arts. The essays include discussions of the ‘myth of creativity’, the music of Robert Schumann, the borders of sanity in the writing of Lawrence Durrell, the ‘insane truth’ of Virginia Woolf, the meeting of doctor and patient in the poetry of Anne Sexton, mood disorders in the fiction of David Foster Wallace, love and madness in the poetry of Hafiz of Shiraz, and the paintings of Adolf Wölfli. Central to this discussion of creativity, madness and civilisation is the difficulty of establishing an appropriate and effective vocabulary and mindset between critics and clinical psychiatrists, which would enable them to work together in understanding mental disturbance in creative artists.

Richard Pine

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