James Gifford has edited a number of collections before publishing his first monograph, Personal Modernisms: Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes (University of Alberta Press $34.95) in 2014. This literary history recovers the "lost generation" of writers of the 1930s and 1940s. Gifford examines the anti-authoritarian quality of contemporaries Alex Comfort, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Durrell, J.F. Hendry, Henry Miller, Elizabeth Smart, Dylan Thomas, and Henry Treece to forge a link between Late Modernist and postmodernist literature.

Gifford followed this work by editing From the Elephant's Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings (University of Alberta Press, 2015), a collection of 38 previously unpublished or out-of-print essays and letters by Lawrence Durrell, renowned for the Alexandrian Quartet novels.

James Gifford is Associate Professor of English and director of the university core at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Vancouver. He has also held academic posts at Simon Fraser and Victoria Universities. He lists as particular interests: Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Elizabeth Smart, T.S. Eliot, Robert Duncan, Aidan Higgins, and related authors. He holds a BA, English from Simon Fraser University and a PhD, English from the University of Alberta.

BOOKS

Personal Modernisms: Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes (University of Alberta Press, 2014) $34.95 978-1-77212-001-1

Durrell, Lawrence: From the Elephant's Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings (University of Alberta Press, 2015) Editor.

[BCBW 2015]